Dog On The Floor In The Pet-Food Aisle
It’s so simple, really, the tenderness we need lives everywhere, there is no place it does not live, and we seek it savagely, and we flail and hurl and fling ourselves toward the brass ring of it, as if it were a narrow chance, a shining and unlikely prize. . . . It is hard to pinch the air between our fingers, but we are determined. It is hard to survive by denying ourselves, but we are accustomed. It is hard to live inside the flawed and gritty chambers we believe ourselves to be, but we have strapped our bodies in, we watch our lives through airplane windows, small and dim and scarred, and even so, life noses up, rolling before us like a black dog, its brown eyes steady as the sun, its belly in the air, asking for touch.
Cleveland, March
In the thawed and startled city, in the center of the stream, the white foam journeying so faithfully around the stones and complicated roots isn’t clean — still, the stems and spoiled leaves wave gaily up in their decay, the slimy moss grows slick as sex, the bare trees hold aloft the nudity of sky; last winter’s dried-up leaves, which had believed all movement lost to them, skip a little now, on the path. You notice you are hungry, though not urgently. You notice an old Chinese man on a bicycle: how beautiful his face. Also the bumblebee jogger in his yellow T-shirt, tight black shorts, the women striding with their small deliberate weights, the child wavering on skates, each of her kneepads a smiley face, and the several million ants massed like a pile of spilled chocolate sprinkles around the open mouth of the lost beautiful cup. You are not crying about anything. You are not even stopping yourself from crying about anything. Motionless in their red robes, the robins meditate like monks. A German shepherd, belly fringed with tiny drips, squats shitting on the path. The endless water thanks its endless current, lucky as your life.
