Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993

Spot in Space and Time

Spot in Space and Time Despite his name, the dog's an imposition—lying in the kitchen, begging in the bedroom, with his lousy posture and unseemly salivation—even Pavlov's dog exposes us (for men are known by companies they keep). At least a dog cannot expose himself—thank God it takes some clothing to do that. The chicken in its coop, the chicken in its roasting pan, the chicken in its place, I mean, with ruffles of parsley at its ankles, doesn't seem indecent. Then you sit it up on the edge of a table and cross its legs and look: it's naked. The indignant have a word they cannot say alone: here (here). The soothers say: there (there). The dog's confused. He's neither fish nor fowl. There in the mirror is another dog, a fury of frequencies hackled. Nor can Rover go to Esalen and find himself; he scowls instead into the new communications dish. Remember how you dropped that barbecued rib in your lap, that casual affair in eighty-eight, when everyone wore white? Remember how the girls were all named Faith and Prudence then? Today 161 the supermarket carts are full of little Harmonies and Heathers. Virtue's gotten mild, to say the least. That's pretty good, the mother says, that's pretty pretty. Grandma falls asleep, and there, in the deepest doghouse, is a child. Between the looking forward and remembering, it's hard to find a moment for the present. I remember space from when it was a nothing. Now we understand it's full, with very little room for vacancy. The latest on the emptiness was on the radio: what's not, said scientists, is smaller than we thought. (Perhaps it is the thought they're measuring, since everything we know must fit inside the temples where a sky, by God, is understandable. It isn't nothing we cannot imagine—nothing is the very stuff of faith. It's something we've forgotten, something we are missing, in our human grade and groove.) The thinker stands still, thinking of himself, while (there, in his abandoned microscope) a million mountains move. 162 ...