DUDE
In my mind’s eye I always see
The closed door to eternity.
I think I’ll take it,
and then I start to think I won’t.
As though I had a choice in the matter.
As though the other side of it
was something inexorable, something fluxed.
As though the though would never exist.
The dog gets sick. The dog runs away.
You’ve got your mind on transubstantiation.
The dog
Runs away. The dog gets sick, the son calls to tell you
That he’s been fired.
You’ve got your mind on transubstantiation.
The world’s a mass of cold spaghetti.
The dog runs away, your mind’s still on transubstantiation.
The dog’s gone missing, the dog comes back.
The same dog, but a different dog,
in different weather.
The droop-bellied dark clouds loom
And suck up their forks of light
and the dog goes missing
A second time, and who can blame him?
If he disappears again, your mind’s back on transubstantiation.
We live beyond the metaphysician’s fingertips.
It’s sad, dude, so sad.
There is no metaphor, there is no simile,
and there is no rhetoric
To nudge us to their caress.
The trees remain the trees, God help us.
And memory, for all its warmth,
is merely the things we forgot to forget.
That’s it. The winds over Punta San Vigilio,
Though welcome, are only winds.
In front of us the door tingles.
Behind us, the fingertips tingle.
And here, in the back country,
Junk grass grows down to the creek, the lilacs hang their heads,
And our only world surrounds us like stretched skin,
and beats its drum.