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 überdog 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.