Song with Dog and Cemetery

The dog, wounded, in half light

flees her fear smell through the cemetery,

past cones of plastic roses, past flags and broken stones,

the monument to the Tongan chief

who brought his tribe here a century ago

then died soon after, homesick

for scents of salt and water, heart converted finally

to the air and to the earth.

with her teeth, making a large wound where the small one was,

making blood and lymph run freely,

And so between slabs of gray and the grasses dying

in the desert heat, all I see is red, red, red:

every spot before me

a poppy in bloom, every glance a taint

of embarrassment in the cheek.

The dog is mine

so I need to save her,

believing her to be weaker than me, my child

because I will not have one of my own, too late

with desire, too frightened or unsure

what would happen with one so enfolded, raptured.

I will not take anymore,

the way Hannah’s womb would not take,

scorching itself of sperm, turning her witless, so mad

for the child God would not give her

she appears drunk with grief.

Do you believe her?

It’s an old story

and one I get wrong, too used

to disbelief, not one who wants to be pulled

into the shadow of faith

the way my friend does, sick in the hospital,

breast milk having soured in a lump

in her arm socket, a swelling so violent that at first

it looked like cancer, and so they drained and scraped

and drained again, they radiated her uselessly

until her skin turned wormwood

and they stripped the fragile nodes

like spider webs of bloody light—

Till she turned feverish, raved, her wide mouth

a glassy stain

she could not press upon the new, soft head,

the hot shadow

We should have comforted her,

those of us without children, watching

medicine’s liquid urge

wreaked inside her as still some part of us stayed

indifferent; some part of us grew, like me, proud,

even envious of her body’s failure—

(that was the bitterness in it, my gloating)—

Hannah, stranger,

tell me what I keep without hesitation.

Not my friend, you say. Not even

this dog, who came to me

too late; who arrived and stayed

a duty: every night

I put out food for her, I stroke

the red wedge face, I speak

sometimes sweetly, sometimes so brutally I cannot believe

a human mouth can make such sounds,

telling me she is not my daughter

until I am drunk with anger, swollen

and fierce with it, wrapped in its burning, acid gown.

~

And here are the cemetery’s statues of angels,

fat flesh chiseled with rain so that the cheeks

appear flagellated, the pert mouths tugged down

in a scowl over youth’s dissolving.

All the settler’s children’s graves are spongy

with age; the foreign names

softened into partial anonymity:

Ephraim and Nephi, Vashti, Tobit, Esdras, Uriel—

who are these stillborn strangers

but tales only the oldest would remember,

the ones who said the prayers and rituals and set stones out

among the grasses

and let the grasses grow in the desert

and let the desert bloom with storefronts,

traffic, playgrounds, making us surround their children,

making us learn to value their dead.

An old story, the dead: how they keep growing.

how they keep needling us, lonely,

wounded to the bone.

How they bleed their long fingers

into our houses, our gardens, into the very hair

of the child I only sometimes wish I had,

that ghost with its blackened mouth

coming to nurse at my breast,

smothered each night by hand.

The song in me has dried out. An old story:

unable to cling to faith, unable to steer with it,

cutting through the dark waters.

~

A sad song, though I gloat over it:

Another kind of tragedy. The human one.

What would define them.

What they would believe or pretend to

when desire hurt them,

their made or chosen bodies broken

by what they once called need.

What I myself might see could only I turn to it.

The dog runs. She is wounded. She is bleeding.

She is fingered by the dead whose living shadow we call pain.

Thou shall not seethe a lamb in its mother’s milk, Hannah sings to me.

As she keens, my friend’s breasts grow light with song; they empty

like her heart does, an old story. The human one.

Such are the choices left to us;

we keep what we must. So I follow her

deep into the cemetery. I run.