Everyone, in time, walks a dog
and sniffs out modicums of what
God has always guided us to know:
We are free, we are bounded merely
by the stuff that seems to reckon with
mortality. We are leashed, thereby, with
mind meanderings that tell us we are free!
—to scrunch what’s bound to do us in, to run
in lines that may parallel railway tracks or may
cross them unawares, to leap as wantons will
away across small streams, to tear into the
nebula of nothing worth a second nosing,
(let alone the threat of snarfing poison)
whatever ills our masters’ litter leave
us here—along our lowly paths—or
there—in will-o-wisp despair—we
are abominadoggedly free. So be!
Because that anvil can’t suffice, I’ll walk
the dog again today and leash myself to
other points of view. Everyone, in time,
walks a dog; by corollary everyone then
meets the local unknown; by extension,
then, everyone is better known because
of this unknown mélange; more circum-
section, then, admits to reasons why we
walk and why the block that at the same
time ties us to our own, sometimes bids
us be alone: pleasantly, predictably, one
with other ones—alone and not alone—
I’ll walk my dog with kindred souls who
walk their dogs alone, traversing blocks
beyond our own, then circle back to that
which doggedly we’ll call home. Did we
ask the dog? Well,.. that’s another poem!
Dan, I like this poem and its prose poem turn. I also like the recurring motif and your point to another poem.
ReplyDeleteOn my seven hour solo drive to Columbus this weekend (Andrew had caught a ride with a friend a day ahead of me), one of the ways I passed the miles was to return to my short list of memorized poems, which almost invariably begins with my set-to-music Walking Song (previously posted here). Was that the 'nother poem you refer to? Or should we look forward to more to come?
More on that motif. In Columbus, I was reading through David Ferry's "Bewilderment," the 2012 National Book Award winner for poetry (and it gets my own recommendations - I have rarely been compelled to read, reread and absorb every poem in a collection) when I came across his "Street Scene," which starts "Someone's shadow and the shadow of his dog" and then moves on to allusions of Shakespeare's Sonnet 15: "That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows" and "whereon the stars in secret influence comment." And just last week, while studying one of T.S. Eliot's Waste Land footnotes, I read about how Gerard de Nerval, before being sent to an asylum, was found "leading a lobster at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and knows the secrets of the sea)."
But it's nice to hear from a kindred soul on the subject, who newly appreciates the feeling of the leash's tug and cannot help but wonder what secrets his own dog knows.