Ars Poetica: After a Dog

Here is a sex shop and a Bible shop
two doors down. Between them a sick hound roams.
Let's suppose this. There is also a two-
family house (where three families live)
across the street from a deli and this
check-cashing shack with a rabbit hutch out
back. Any one of these has been burned down
twice.
          Let's suppose this is America.

Over the years we have become the kind
of tribe that has forgotten how it trades,
over chess and chit-chat, a mango or
Jesus honey for knives. Now, we thank God
the Almighty we don't know what it's like
to be close to one another. Georgy
the Idiot, for example, feeds this
sick dog flowers. And we watch him. But then

suppose two (or twenty) of us—more—
hear a sound, some familiar din, far-off
tambourines, children's laughter, though a bit
dark, like bell and bone, and it simply grows
until we are looking at each other
wide-eyed with this small thrill calling us out,
this handsome buzz-saw racket, this rhythm
that bores the air a gurdy hum. What if,
our numbers suddenly flood a small stretch
of spoiled turnpike or dried out meadow, what
kind of sound is this that rallies us all
from precinct to nook, what noise to muster
tremors from King James and Hustler alike,
what uproar, what raucous fuss in every
American vicinity, and I
know you don't believe any human noise
can call us all together per se, but,

listen, suppose we are moved, summoned, you,
me, and the rest of us who want to know
something about everything we've outlived.
By hullaballoo, we gather, beckoned,
not too far from the XXX store and
the Bible store, not too far at all for
Georgy to carry in his sleeves the scent
of mongrel or bad cheese or onion skin
and cheap ink, and you and I and Georgy
and all stand, elbow to elbow, this small
throng of the ordinary, armed for once
with our full wits, and no, let us not say
it is a singing, but say this, this sound,
as we approach, gets stranger and stranger,
so much so, we mistake it for ourselves.
It has the bony rattle of dice-quick
wrists, the abundance of olives and lake-
shore sand. It resembles the scripture and
curse you and I, in dim-lit squares and dance-
floor muck, in crawfish mud and dancehall wine,
in broken-bed and graveyard bliss have been
grinding for all our lives, this joyful wind
and rewind of the body back down and
into jubilance so old no vector
of bullet or blade could fleck the soggy
pale neck of a boy offered to God, no
battalions of angels to save him, say,
what if this sound that is not a singing
becomes, one by one, the lot of us, us
improbable, us gorgeously common,
us tune's contagion. What if us do sing
with sand caught in our teeth, mango dripping
from our mouths. Jesus-honey wild, what if
the very knives start clanging too. What if
those first no-song strains open the sex-shop
neon in us, musk in us, whiskey stink
so deep down in us we sing like this: so
funky, so loud, we refuse to neglect
what ramshackle bunkhouse, penthouse, whorehouse
we were drawn from in the first place or how
the hell we will ever find our way back.

Even so, let's not forget, the long yawp
of the poor dog who ate fresh petals some
moron savant force-fed it, having spent
three full spring days stitching them together
with metal barbs,

                            what if no one recalls
that sound,
                   except
                              the few surviving dogs,
the twisted thin-wire fence and the silent
magnolia blast every May. I say,
let us not slip back through the dark to sting
and peck our beloveds with more than our
usual misdeeds. I say, let us not
forget a sick hound's metallic hack and
skirl, for Georgy has found a few more dogs
to feed his barbed garlands to and before
we count ourselves among the blessed, let's say,
we ain't done yet howling into gray tombs,
ain't yet done cracking necks. Let's say this, once
and for all, for kicks, we won't taste sulfur
at the end of a fuse.
                                When one is born,
when one dies, when one steals a moldy loaf
of bread—

                    this is how it is. The dildos
go on sale, in the rabbit hutch a snake,
we've played checkers with all the pawns, but if
there have been any lies, we're sure to let
everyone know now what they are and who
started them.

                       Some of us will not get fed
but let's listen, spooning in the dark, for
laughter,
               for if we're lucky, sometimes both
the darkness and the laughter are our own.

This is America. If we've no choice
but sing
              in multitude no better than
the soul of a wrongly punished dog, may
God, for once, not grant us many more things
as foolish as that, given the way we
ruin our guts on rusted steel and bloom.




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