Because I used to have trouble
keeping my gym locks, and trouble
learning new combinations,
I began to make small poems,
mnemonics, associating a word
with a number and thus calling up
little narratives, though the only phrases
I could remember were those
whose intent I could use:
4–20–24 became Behind the door
there is plenty, and behind the plenty
there is more—an affirmation,
I knew, once I’d repeated it,
to do with faring well in the world.
Then I thought it had to do with time
—couldn’t there be more?—
and then with love. Abundance
could to a certain degree be trusted.
I lost that one. Then 7–26–4 became
Heaven be quick to open the door,
which I thought was for myself
at first, but I wasn’t in any hurry;
it was for my golden companion,
whose form had begun to admit
imperfection, who’d begun to fail,
and if it had to be that way,
quickly then, no struggle, leap—
Then I lost that one.
On one of his last walks, he stopped
on the corner of Thompson and Prince,
nostrils startlingly wide with the scent
drifted from a lunchstand soup kitchen’s
open window. Believe me,
a dog’s gaze opens, like ours,
when the world’s an invitation;
it was a summons, the smell of that soup,
and every reason to continue in this life.
35–9–15, I tried
(alive, fine, sheen)
but every consolation I rang
rhymed false, until I dreamed
a deep basement beneath the house,
and all the gone dogs drifting
forward there, in the same direction, away.
And he said—I could hear
his thinking, in the dream—
I want to go with them!
What did I know? Maybe
what he wanted was nothing
I’d ever imagine. 35–9–15;
no matter what the numbers
I could say the old poem:
35 could rhyme with heaven,
and 9 with quick, and fifteen door,
and I say these words almost daily,
—to the next—
and I have never lost that lock.