And still the dog barks.
Why wouldn’t it?
Why would it be silent?
Is the overcast sky capping the hanging heat
close against our skin
any less nefarious
a night than a cloudless summer evening cut from the
fresh center of the season?
The dog sees, the dog barks.
A waitress today knelt next to me and whispered
“I just wanted to tell you:
you have such delicate little hands.”
This seems an awkward impulse to have
towards another human being.
That some aspect
of their anatomy occurs to you as extreme.
So much so that you cannot bear not
to express to them, not to alert them, alarm them
with your awed impressions of that
part, that bone
covered in muscle, wrapped
in epidermal tissue. Idly attached to them
just clutching, grasping, reticulating
as they sit,
quietly enjoying a hamburger.
It is strange to be admired for something
you cannot choose or alter
only, perhaps, adorn or disguise
in rings and gloves and lacquer.
Looking down, the color on my hands
is chipped,
has been for months,
my nails, a gory and chipped mess.
I don’t know how to respond
to this compliment
which I wrangle into place
by surrounding it
by self-deprecation,
direct their view to the rest
of the body governing
these wee, elfin, gnomish hands,
these tiny, childlike empress
earlobes, these miniaturized, precious
bitty feets
being elephantine.
Sluggish. Immorally decadent, extruded
ill-formed
and an asymmetric center askew
from its poles.
I think these things
when really
all that needs be said
is thank you
for seeing me
however it is that you see me.
This morning I had a moment of remembering those elfin feet
desiring to touch the green grass and the slippery edges of a summer
already with its kitchen packed up
it has only the heavy things: the couch left
and the television
to bear the lonely nights until eviction.
It’ll have to order in.
I think I wanted to make some sort of escape.
Go forest bathing, or even stand in a stand of aspens.
Touch the bark and feel the chalky tailings
of its shooting, urgent life
rub off in my precious, darling palm and know
that aspens still are as they are
even without my complimenting eye, my hand,
my abiding esteem borne
out of ending up daily in their
scarred and pocked beauty
But there was hardly time for that,
not when I
dreamed of mountains and dreamed of roads up mountains and dreamed
of cracking eggs
of leaving the amniotic sac untouched so that I
could dream the dreamy yolk,
the orange, glowing, golden prize
for a reality tv show that judged people
on inventiveness,
on kindness
and finally,
on being good.
And woke up, banjo music soft in my ear, an hour late.
The music, the daylight, the traffic none of it minded.
None of it tapped its toes or tsk’d at my delay.
You wonder about the order of things, the reason for
a body and its constant intersection with time and place.
I saw a dead doe on the road.
Newly felled.
Its neck bent back 45 degrees against itself.
I saw the whites of its eyes.
I prayed for it and drove on to work, a witness
to an end.
The dog sees. The dog barks.
