Sheet Music

If you cannot trust the dog, the faithful one?

And is this anyway a dog? The shadows move,

Dog and dog, two lanky figures, three, sniffing

The garden’s charred terrain, the darkening grass

The bleeding beds of flowers, sniffing the stones

And lunging at the rabbits that spring from the beds,

Wet creatures, mad with haste, mad and wet

And white as the half-hearted moon that stepped

Behind the clouds and has not come back....The rain

Fell hard, and now the mist rises, consolidates, disperses,

That thought, this, your face, mine, the shapes

Complicating the air around the abandoned birdhouse,

Big as a summer hotel, thirty rooms

For thirty birds, thirty perches from which to sing.

Such is the moon when it is full. A giant birdhouse

Tilted high on a steel pole, a pale blue box

Full of the shredded sheet music of long-dead birds....

The dogs move fast. How will I follow? And which one?

They are not in agreement. If the dog cannot be trusted,

Then what? The foot? But the foot is blind, the grass

Cold through the thin socks, the instep bared like a neck.

And now the flowers rise. The mums and asters,

The tall gladioli knocked back as the rain creeps up

In the mist, and the mist thickens and moves about me

Like a band of low-bred mummers, dripping scent,

Pulling my hair, my arms, trying to distract me,

But still I hear it, the dark sound that begins at the edge

Of the mind, at the far edge of the uncut field

Beyond the garden—a low braying, donkey

Or wolf, a low insistent moan. If I whistle

Will the dogs come? Can I gather their trailing leashes

And hold them in my hand? They cannot be held.

How pale the paint of the birdhouse. How ghastly pale

The sound of the cry coming closer....If I forsake

The dogs?....If I forsake the mummers?....If I step

Like a fool into the glassy outer darkness?....O self....