“I am in that temper that if I were under water
I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
-JOHN KEATS
I heard Churchill
had called it canine.
It woke me
just this morning, soft nose pushed
to my sleepy
cheek, breath shuttling down
my cool neck:
my faithful black dog.
His tail
clubbed me all shades of violet.
The sun
disc-sawed me in half.
He follows
me to the kitchen.
Here he comes,
his wolfish shape
gleaming
like polished jet. I stoop over
my coffee,
hiss at him to shoo.
My voice is
thick as seafoam
and the
silly dog is deaf;
his dumb
tongue a huge slab of mauve,
searching my
hand like a rodent.
When milk
won’t do, he loves the salt of rivers.
His rough
tongue batters my eye.
Wherever I
go, he follows.
At office
desks, restaurant booths,
hunched in
the seat of a taxi,
my faithful
dog sniffs out my bones.
When lovers
come, he turns possessive.
I wriggle
free from their fingers,
stop them kissing
the sides of my jaw.
They leave
when I talk to the papered wall
and tell
them the guard dog is snarling.
I grieve
when their footsteps have died.
I go to bed
at odd hours
to watch the
small pulse of blue time.
When sleep
stands me up for the zero moon,
the dog strikes
me down with his paw.
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