Dog Years

1

I don't know if there is such a place as a heaven for dogs,

although the world's beliefs would have you believe

it comes down to a clinical discourse on faith and theology

and the definitions of such words as "afterlife," "salvation," and "soul,"

and a particular animated film from the 1980s definitively argued

for the affirmative.

Still....

All I know is that I had him for the past 10 years of my life,

which would have been 70 years for him.

(All things being equal, too, I don't think I could have 

put up with me for those 70 long years.)

And so for that--if for no other reason--

he earned his eternal reward in dog heaven, I think,

if there is such a place.

2

On matters of faith, it is never simple math.

Take the Judeo-Christian Bible, for instance,

if one chooses to believe the stories.

I am aware of the importance of symbols, though,

and that throughout the book's long text, if looking for it,

you will find over 700 references to the number 7.

In terms of that book's circular and circuitous mythology,

that number would appear to be of some importance, then.

"Divine," perhaps.

"God-made," to some.

"Perfect," in a way.

"Complete," in manners no other number can seem to mean,

no matter the faith

or the math.

3

He liked to have his ears scratched.

He would lean into it, he loved it so.

He lost himself, bending into the pressure and the weight of it.

He would moan and then look up at me when I removed my hand,

his brown, soft eyes that burrowed and said,

"What?... That's it?"

He liked to lay in the patches of sunlight

as the day would move across the sky.

He would move along with it, when he could,

and when it appeared in elongated geometric designs

spilled across the carpet.

He sought out warm light,

with the wisdom of The Beatles,

following the sun.

4

He loved to go for walks, although he was terrible at it.

I used to see other dog-owners with their charges

at the end of leashes

complacently at peace, strolling along sidewalks,

dog-calm, cool, collected.

And I wondered how they did it.

For he could never manage that.

Our leash was always taut as a plumb-line

or a rich fishing line, him out front, pulling me forward,

nose alert to everything, not enough time in the day to take it all in,

eyes backward at slowpoke me, struggling to keep pace,

with a mixed gaze of frustration and concern my way,

as if to say,

"Are you all right? Come on.... Catch up."

5

On our last walk together

I didn't need the leash, but I attached it to his collar on ceremony.

It would occur the day before I helped him to his sleep,

and I had no idea, then, of such words as

"ruptured spleen" or "critical anemia."

I just knew there was something wrong.

With a slackened line, it was an unusually slow walk for us.

Haggard. Determined. It was work for him to take a step.

We didn't go far--to the end of the sidewalk and back.

I carried him the last of the way, in through the door,

and lay him down on his bed,

which he also loved beyond compare

and from which he would never stand again

on his own will.

6

Dogs seem to know things we don't.

As much as we love them,

I believe they love us more.

Seven times more, by my rough accounting.

And they forgive us seven-times-seventy times,

more than we can humanly comprehend.

They sense things seven times stronger.

They feel things seven times greater.

They are, after all, seven years ahead of us

in what it means to be

Divine,

God-made,

Perfect,

Complete.

7

You know it's going to hurt, this inevitability of love--

so irrational and unconditional and true,

the very meaning of the words, in fact--

but what you can't possibly know is how much.

I have already been asked several times

if I'm going to get another dog.

And my immediate response is, "No."

But in my heart, maybe, "Yes."

In time.

Maybe in seven years, I wonder.

Maybe then I will know what he already knew.

Maybe then, like some indelible image from Whitman,

I will find him ahead of me, as always, patiently looking back,

and I will finally be able to catch up to him.

Power

Last night was a winter storm,
the kind with weighted ice-snow and winds
from the north--
the kind of winter storm leaving frozen shells
around power lines and tree limbs.
Not a good pairing, the two,
when loaded branches crack and tumble
in a glacial cascade of ice and sparks atop
electric lines, so power full.

That was the kind of storm we had last night.
The kind of winter storm that one falls asleep to,
its oddly lulling whistle of wind
seeping through window seams--
the sound of nature in extremis--
and waking in the morning to a breathless house,
and frozen vistas outside the windows,
and vacant, blank LED lights on clocks throughout,
no red and green and blue deathstare of time, now powerless.

It is only me this morning, and the dog, in the quiet
where normally there is muted buzz of electric surge,
and vented hiss of heated air, and gentle flow of time.
But now the house rests empty of energy.
Now time has stopped
in this house which I quickly scour for blankets,
knitted warmth, quilted fabric of memory and hours.
This house where--once life has been restored--
empowered, I will decide to leave the clocks alone.

Of a Mind to Rename Seasons

I don't know why it's called "Fall," exactly--
as seasons go, I mean.
Of course there is the literalness
of the word, "fall," littered on lawns
the way it is, these leaves of Autumn,
stuck on windshields of cars, and window screens, and on the bottom of shoes
as you tramp noisily through piles of
golden amber red
like some child from long ago kicking through the hiss of dying surf
somewhere far up on the beach.
Playful. At peace. A bucket for sand-castles, swinging innocently at the side.

Here is the grounded meaning of fall, then,
stepping through crunchcrackle of
dried, dead tree appendages--these ends of stems
gone to dirt,
compost fallen underfoot now with soil and worm.
Leaves that only weeks ago (days ago)
clung to life at the edge of existence.
Given up now. Given to ground.

And then there is the air, of course,
with temperatures dropping in a day, it seems,
falling to those comfortable, cozy layers of winter--
so there's always that, as far as the calendar goes--

But, still----"Fall."

I wonder why not "Rise," instead
(if we're of a mind to rename seasons).

Rise--like the sudden, startled flurry of geese
taking air over the pond down the lane from me, early morning,
wingtips gently kissing
unruffled surface of water,
finding lift,
and leaving only the smallest of splashes--like raindrops--
until the relentless beating of synchronized, supple feathers
pulls them into low sky just overhead,
slow, cumbersome, but aloft--heavy and honking, a group of them,
in the calm of the cool, still morning.
Floating and then flying
on currents beneath them,
rising steadily, until gone.

Or the woodsmoke curling from
sleeping rooftops along unbroken geometry of
blocksquare crumbling chimneybricks,
a gentle wisp of quiet, silver breath,
smelling of oak and maple and hickory,
warm and at rest,
smoke floating unseen upward, disappearing
into the orange of sunrise sky.
Gone.

Or the gray cloud of thicker, scalding leafsmoke,
choking the throat, the eyes to tears
at the funeral pyre of fallen leaves, detritus, a heaping pile
next door, still smoldering from the long day,
a drifting residue of cloud
rising upward--disappearing somewhere
like the handful of dry leaves
I close between clenched fingers,
the sound of snapping leaf veins and torn paper
until--palm now filled with dust--
I open my appendages slowly and feel the October wind
take it all away from me,
and what was once leaf
disapparates in a formless motion of air,
rising,
until my eyes give up
and it's gone.

My father died ten years ago to the day.
(What was left of him, the man I loved--first the man, himself,
and then the mind. It was slow.)
It was a cold fall morning, then, too--
early morning, well before geese and smoke from chimney and leaf--
when he was here and then was not.
It was the fall, of all seasons
(this season of empty ends)
when my brothers, and my mother, and my daughters, and I
took turns reaching into a box of cremation,
grabbing, one by one, a handful of the man in ashes
and holding him there, tightly, between fingers
clenched in the tearing Autumn wind
only to slowly unclench, as if pained to do so--

to open my hand
and to watch my father fly away from me,
an intake of breath through the distant trees,
one last time,
and then a final gust, a blast of cold
across the unbroken geometry of flatsquare cornstubble,
and his cloud of ashen dust

                    (as fragile as a leaf)

fluttering up, and up, dissolving, disembodied, lifted,
up, and further up, higher, a part of gray-sky evening now.
And then gone.

Rise.

Important Uses for the Comma

Sometime last night,
Perhaps when I stepped outside
To listen to the whisper
Of conversation between
The owls in the trees, backyard,
And then slipped in again
Through the sliding glass door,

A thin black moth flew too close behind me
Just at the wrong moment
And fell prisoner all night
Trapped between the two doors--
A pane of glass
And a mesh of screen.
I saw it this morning, the moth,

Looking like a forgotten, misplaced comma,
A simple stain of black ink
On the reflective page--
A sentence trailing off,
Saying nothing,
Staring out at the green of trees and grass
And the blue of sky
It could recall now only as a memory,
Only now as remembered desire,

And wondering, perhaps, just
What had happened
To the slightest breeze
That could, in the best of moth-moments,
Suddenly unwrinkle its
Black rice-paper wings and
Lift it to the green and blue
                                                   beyond,
With nothing to connect to now.


So I slid open the doors
And let it go.
It flew tentatively within
The morning's warmth,
As if unsure what to do
With its new-found freedom,
Circled drunkenly for a second or two,
And then lifted clumsily carefree

Toward the protective canopy of leaves,
A balance of mindfully intentioned
Parallelism
And freefall fluttering
Stream-of-consciousness,
A chance to pause,
Until, in a flare of brilliant sunshine
I lost it somewhere far above,

                                     somewhere,
connected.

Still Life

"Sweatshirt weather" it's called

on a morning like this
when the air is between seasons,
unsure of itself,

and I like to walk
down by the creek bed
through the woods behind my house,
a meandering tramp through wet compost,

over winter's silent deadfall,
spring with just a grip
on the slowly greening edges
of things.

A rotting branch I break
across the knee of my jeans is now
a walking-stick over slick stones
shining with dew

and stinking of wet, wormy soil.
And that is when I hear it first,
the crisp crack of a flag
fluttering in the morning breeze,

a whisper of water behind it.
And then I see what I hear:
a plastic, white shopping bag caught
in the upper boughs of a tree.

The bag ruffles
and then settles
for breath enough
to stop my early-morning walk,

to stand in place in the April mud
and be still, and watch, and listen
as the bag fills with a gulp of air
and then again falls slack,

like some ghostly, synthetic lung,
a pale, breathing bellows,
a blank, displaced kite,
some symbol of flown surrender.

And I notice (my boots mud-striped,
a shattered splinter of branch
firmly clutched in my hands)
that this random composition

of brown tree and white, plastic bag,
this awkward embrace of opposites,
this unaesthetic arrangement of no value at all,
this ugly scene

of which no painter would dare waste a canvas
and no poet would dare waste a page,
even this, this thing
which should not be


but is,
is still
somehow
beautiful.

Rehearsing for the Fire

sitting alone in one of the many rooms (from which I soon notice there is only one way in and out), I quietly wait for the doctor to finally knock and eventually breeze in through the door, interrupting my memorization of the skeletal chart on his wall, naming all the bones and the blue-red tangle of nerves--a confused subway map--as well as my fascination with the plastic puzzle-models of the human heart and the wrinkled human brain, looking something like a sad, deflated football, sunken in its middle, resting on the counter by the sharps-disposal and glove-dispenser and the gleaming metal sink, so clear I can see my reflection on its sparkling faucet, everything smelling so clean and fresh, so antiseptic and scrubbed, the way it should smell while waiting in a doctor's clinic on a thin skein of white paper...

...so unlike the damp, vinegar-mildew scent of the basement in our old house where I lived during the first part of my life as a young boy with my family, that basement that obviously thought nothing of taking in water through the window wells (those less-than-watertight vases) where now we stood--my three brothers, myself, and Mom--listening to Dad going over the procedure for exiting the house as quickly and safely as possible in the unlikely event of a fire, and we would grab the nearby stepladder, he pointed out, and quickly and efficiently slide the latches on the windows and then kick away the screens to gain soggy access into the wells and to the rest of our lives, and we each got to try our luck with the latches and the windows, I remember; like some carnival-barker, he was: "Step right up, kid," though I was only four years old and could barely reach the windows, let alone the latches, with my thin, weak bonefingers (those four-year-old proximal and intermediate and distal phalanges) so unused to serious work like moving in concert to save a life, my young boy's hands in that dank basement better put to countless hours spent playing with my brothers and with our toys--scattered like some motherlode along the dusty rows of wooden shelves stacked with Matchbox cars, and metal-cast replicas of tractors and trucks, and plastic Johnny West cowboy action-figures--the kind that would sometimes fly apart from overuse, literally losing their limbs and head, like the worst torture imaginable, drawn-and-quartered and beheaded all at once, until my dad (always frugal and industrious) discovered one day how to mend the tired, dismembered cowboys; like some frontier doctor himself, with needlenose-pliers, pins, a hot-glue gun, and rubber bands, and then--wouldn't you know--those cowboys good as new, plastic-molded arms and legs all in place once more, everything fine--except the unfortunate head, which would never move again, glued in place at the base like some stiff-necked plainsman, never again to casually turn toward a sunset, or to tilt his head for a kiss from the woman he loves, or to nonchalantly catch a glance of the lone, mysterious gunman who carries with him the bullet (always a price to be paid, it seems, for enjoying life one more day), these young hands of mine were more used to playing in that basement with only matters of make-believe, you see, certainly nothing like real-life latches and windows and flames, those soft young hands were more used to playing--in that basement--the thick stack of old 45s on my mother's well-worn console-stereo--the stack of small, black discs with song-titles like: "If I Fell," by The Beatles, and The Band's, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and though I had no earthly idea, then, who The Beatles were, of course--being only four--and The Band's song made no sense to my four-year-old ears and mind (was the song, after all, about some girl named "Dixie," I wondered, and where was she being driven down to, and why--perhaps some subway-platform, I thought, to await the Danville train--whatever that was), I simply knew that for my brothers and me this music was good, and it was fun, and we quickly learned that leaving up the arm on the record player saw the needle-stylus return as if by magic to the abrupt plunk-and-hiss of the spinning black disc's opening groove, and play ad infinitum a soundtrack to our lives spent in that basement--the very basement our dad was trying now to show us how to leave, if need be, one by one, all of us taking our confused and frightened turns to rehearse for some fire that he told us could happen...

...in this appointed room at this appointed time at the doctor's clean clinic, sitting alone on the table, taking a break, for a moment, from bones and brain and heart, when the doctor suddenly appears as promised, breaking the deathly silence of memory and ushers himself into the small room, sitting on a milkmaid's stool in the close corner of the pristine little room (from which, I notice, there is no escape), he looks at me all the while through his fashionably thin black-rimmed frames and, amidst the growing crackleroar of flames and the final, acidic smell of smoke, slowly begins to say something

My Only Swerving

         

          "...around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

          I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --,

          then pushed her over the edge into the river."

                    -- William Stafford, "Traveling Through the Dark"

I came upon the deer, mottled light brown

and tufts of white across the neck and tail,
scared doe--eyes wide--tough hide, so lean, and frail,
perfectly hidden, colored like the ground


and the lonely barren winter hue.
She darted across the road, empty asphalt,
directly in my path, my car, no fault
of mine, I say. (Though I know that's not true.)


Perhaps it was my mind not on the road.
Perhaps, Odysseus-like, my thoughts of home,
Artemis disguised, wild undertow
pulling me thoughtlessly along. Alone,


save for the deer, and car--an entwined mystery
of life, and blood, and death in symmetry.