10:58 am | 10 July 2003 | very much

I wrote the following a long long time ago (when I was 20, i think? then revised at 21?) for two people with whom i was in love (it's complicated). For a long time afterwards i couldn't read or even look at this piece--how could i have been so wrong, i would think, and would be doubly sorry because i really liked it (the poem, not the disappointed heart). Here, read it before i conclude my point.

I�m fluttering on a telephone pole
like a crude mimeograph for a lost dog
Where the description is just vague enough
�lost dog, black, very much missed�
That it�s any dog, is every dog, is
the �berdog within us all.

I�m fluttering and once again History
is subtracting itself: and I, the queen,
Sit idly among the astronomers
and these girls I may be forced to snap in half.
The anemic astronomers sweep the sky with dark-engorged eyes
looking for the lost dog, sadly missed, looking
for the Dog Star (it may already be missed) and
The spindle-girls sit and stare and
stare at their powerless hands.
I, the queen (of astronomers, spindles, mimeographs) look steadily
Away from these telescopes� lenses, look away
from the lately-creviced girls
Because I have told them time and time again
that on a black night a black dog cannot be seen.

I creep finally to a back door
Creep out and staple myself to a post
and flutter in the western wind
Until I am torn away
(and I am very much missed)
and I ride the black night
until I am at last pressed against a window
Needlessly

Because the sun is rising
and because I realize now
that you are a city
where the lost dogs always always come home

So i was rereading this with a heavy heart, wracking myself over symbolism (i tend to write in such a specialized lexicon of image that when the impetus behind a poem or story no longer exists i can't stand to look at it), and i was thinking to myself "well, those two were definitely not that city" and then it struck me that there's kind of a weird synchronicity to it. Because three years later i found a black dog, who must not've been very much missed, because she didn't go home--not to her original home, anyway. Instead, she came to mine. So I hereby & publicly rededicate this piece to Guinn.

I've got a house-big heart where we all live,
clm.