No myths today. The upward drafts of chill
afternoon are set like rabbit sticks in the road:
trip here over the metal-frantic knock of the gate lock
against the iron fence; trip again over the soprano-pitch of cheap wind-chimes. Knowing
oneself is the process of coming to know oneself.
I wrote this once in a dull white room in seminary
that smelled of mud-on-boots and pencils warmed over ears.
Slush and hum of distant traffic is Irish on the radio in Letterkenny
this summer: ardhuire, Doire, Eireann, Eireann.
I held the one word I knew, fog in my mouth; held
steaming wheels to wet pavement, waiting for the slippy sounds
to take me out of the roundabout. That night, when I opened
the boot, a bee delirious and too half-dead to be angry,
zig-zagged away. I was lost when a man with dark hands sweeping
his porch in Peckham said, It’s a bit of to-ing and fro-ing.
But that was before Letterkenny. Each Wednesday in Lent
we braid the air with psalms; shiny ribbons of belief,
A perfect echo of longing. A man crossed the gravel path
with the urgent step of someone being chased.
He held his ladder like a gun. My dog draws
his white paw to his black-and-white body and slowly,
more slowly each day, moves his old shadow to the shade.
The adolescent tangle of barks is beneath him now.
On the deck with his snout in the sun and a bone in his stomach,
he waits for a smell. For two days he found the same
Taco Bell burrito – under a pile of leaves, under a deck – and trotted back
to me, triumphant. Always I tossed it away. He runs after
tennis balls with a hopeful, double-legged leap.
This year I’ve pressed my life into this dog and aged him.
Don’t let it destroy you, my mother says. How when it is everywhere.
It will relent, it will relent. It does not relent.
The effect of grief is as green and dazzling
as any sweet slow mammal movement
or the swoop and scuffle-spit of foreign vowels.
None of the day will cheer me. |
