What the Dog Perhaps Hears
...We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child...
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel...
whether in autum, when the trees
dry up... there isn't a shudder...
What is it like up there
For us...
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
... we heard nothing when the world changed.

There was a time when politicians like you preferred to use a dog whistle, but those days seem quaint now. There’s something to be said for using a foghorn to blast your racism across the continents. At least we all know what kind of politics you represent.

Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK, let's get that dog whistle out.

Every morning he went for a walk with his wife, Reine-Marie, and their German shepherd Henri. Tossing the tennis ball ahead of them, they ended up chasing it down themselves when Henri became distracted by a fluttering leaf, or a black fly, or the voices in his head. The dog would race after the ball, then stop and stare into thin air, moving his gigantic satellite ears this way and that. Honing in on some message. Not tense, but quizzical. It was, Gamache recognized, the way most people listened when they heard on the wind the wisps of a particularly beloved piece of music. Or a familiar voice from far away.

You didn’t know your dog was deaf?” “No, we thought it was stupid.

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?

You're supposed to wolf whistle! Like this…” Recklessly eyeballing her the whole way, he pursed his lips and let go a wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled both the white woman's pretty painted toes and the dainty red ribbon in her blond hair. Now it was her turn. And my father stood there, lustful and black, as she just as defiantly not only recklessly eyeballed him back but recklessly rubbed his dick through his pants

[Hearing] was distinct from listening, which could only be achieved when hearing was combined with giving a shit.

“This short watch that is about to come, or rather these two short watches--why are they called dog watches? Where, heu, heu, is the canine connection?'

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does

For one moment the morning took you far out into vague chill, but your body snatched you back into its cosiness, back to the waiting dogs on the hill top. They could not follow out there, their world was walled, their noses trailed the earth. What a dog cannot hear or smell he distrusts; unless objects are close or move he does not observe them. His nature is to confirm what he sees by his sense of sound or of smell.

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn't catch the remark because I wasn't paying attention.

Some things you hear with your ears. Others, you hear with your heart.

the soul has been given it's own ears to hear things the mind does not understand.