But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise

The Night My Dead Dog Comes Back

28 The Night My Dead Dog Comes Back It wasn’t cancer, turns out. Or my fears of dropping her down the stairs the way it happened in a dream, her hindquarter snapping bloodless as a fish stick. It wasn’t anything but the universe skipping ahead somewhere near the end and coming back on the middle it took with it—the dust and stars and dogs, something extragalactic in the mix—and no, the cancer, how it filigreed her esophageal strands same year that boy from high school seized up behind the steering wheel of his benz—was never more than occasional transient clusters unaccounted for in the galaxy moving on toward some blacker denser point —luckily, my dog tells me, in this new real none of that was real—I didn’t lay my body among tarbushes outside Acropolis to let some Marcos pull down my top with the hand that wasn’t unzipping— 29 —even the julienne I make of my thumb & peppers tonight streams away from me to some cosmic core—there was no embracing this or that trickylittlelie the nine-tenths moon told, hung like a warhead over a child lunging toward a piece of cheese in an outstretched hand—the endless blues, the bridge out and out and out for good—where Cornus Canadensis douses our boots in infinite nuclei, a just-bloomed connection comes alive among clumpy distributions of the stellar. ...