Four Poems from The Loneliness of Dogs

                   

published by Pudding House Publications,

March 2008 and presented here by permission

You

We were walking on the beach,  

someone and I.  

I want to say you, 

but I am still weighing the small ghosts of our actions.  

It was night and the world  

was so obviously cold,  

a cold calm   

that comes from being outside a bar  

instead of in.   

A woman staggered out,   

and for a moment, the stars jangled  

with a honky-tonk sound   

then settled back to look down.  

Teetering out toward the water,   

over the soft indifference of the sand,   

she suddenly turned 

back 

to face the empty road and the closed door of the bar  

and, with a swift hike of coat and skirt, 

dropped her undies, squatting down to pee.   

She hadn’t seen us

(we were like the witnessing stars—but closer

and on the same level as the rest of the world).  

And there,   

in the untinseled dark,  the small waves slapping away  

the jolly voices of Jingle Bells,  

I was seized with the sudden desire 

to-run-the-hundred-yards-of-beach-toward-the-curling-crescent-moons-of-her-hips-and-

take-her-swiftly-from-behind-pressing-myself-into-that-soft-side-of-her-self-which-she-

couldn’t-see . . .  

then I wanted a wind   

to whip up the sand around us,

cloaking us in a Biblical manner, 

the air mingling with fire and the fine grit of stone,

until we would both be charioted away 

to that place we all imagine.   

Instead, 

my companion commented on the form of her squat, 

grading her like an Olympian of failed attempts, 

and we laughed.   

                     

This is something you wouldn’t have done, 

which tells me, now, it wasn’t you 

but some ghost I will never be rid of.

 

The Ratio of Danger to Love

Once, I walked the tightrope

of a round guard rail on a bridge

carrying an injured woman to safety.

Below, cars sped impatiently

across the long macadam reach to home

not knowing that, above, on a stretched

tube of stainless steel,  

a new Wallenda

was trying out his act: balancing

on his hip a frightened woman all jelloed

into incomprehensible gibberish

claiming she had finally seen the light

as her car rolled roof over wheels

into the chaos of the breakable.

And I was complete.

The Flea

I keep reading tales of transformation

in which a human abstraction adds

symbolism to an otherwise mute beast.

In one, epistemology becomes a flea,

making the flea’s mind bigger than its body,

grounding it with sheer knowledge, wingless

against its own inescapable brilliance.

What does it mean to be immensely endowed

with a notion of knowledge that encompasses

knowledge itself?  To possess it all in a skull

smaller than a thimble—its weight making

your brain bow?  Where does the flea

put down such a burden, lay its hairy leg

against the prickly succor of its mate?       

How can it ever take pleasure again

in the horny rub-a-dub-dub of another

when it has already entertained

all the possible thoughts of its lover

and known the quick tic and buzz of its

mate’s hesitation before it happens?

The Confessional Poet’s Confession

Now I see I lacked imagination

writing so many poems in that same person

until the I of my typewriter wore out,

and I was banished from the page

guilty of nothing more than my own experience,

that consciousness I never stepped out of

to enter the head and see through the eyes of another—

say the woman I once lived with and loved.

Today the hormonal tides of her absence start

to rush through my veins, and I suddenly feel

the full flood of her presence rising so fast

that, soon, I’ll be over my head, drowning

in all she should have held against my capital I,

that way I saw the world where the blinders of my being

cropped off her existence at the knees

so she had nothing to stand on

while the unshakable earth

affirmed itself beneath my feet.

You can purchase The Loneliness of Dogs at: http://www.puddinghouse.com

The Confessionalist Poet’s Confession, You, The Flea and The Ratio of Danger to Love are published by Pudding House Publications. Used here by permission.