Fire Baton: Poems

The Black Dog of the Blue Ridge

The Black Dog of the Blue Ridge I believe in his black dog because he had no taste for fiction, my grandfather, no love for tricks of the tongue (when his clever nurse/son called the stumps of his Sugared-off legs “little whales lying beached on the sheets,” it just angered him worse). I believe in his black dog because he was never the star of his stories, he never saved lives or turned down all the millions that liars so often decline. Like the Gospels, in which the Apostles are so clearly schlemiels, bad fishermen, running away, dissing Nazareth (nowhere, Nathaniel calls it), they must be telling the truth. If they’d lied they’d have better PR. So my grandfather spoke of the soul he saw blaze into grace. He was late to do chores for a sick neighbor, dawdling along picking chestnuts (the blighted kind) up, and he turned 5 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 5 at a gooseneck. The view opened. Flames filled the neighbor’s roof, rippling the clear air above. He lit out running, pounding his way down the ruts—chestnuts flying from pockets, hands, hat—and arrived to find no fire, no damage except that the man he’d been sent to help milking was dead. I believe in the black dog my grandfather saw disappear, grizzly-big, burning-eyeballed, that loped like a dog in the path of his headlamps. He braked for the black dog and saw it leap through, not over, but through the stone wall of a springhouse and vanish. No tracks in the dust or the mud. No disorder among the cool rounds of pressed butter, no gap in the milkcans’ ranks, no blade remotely like bent in the garden beyond. In my grandfather’s last days, he’d lie on the porch, stare downstreet at dealers’ dogs, pacing their plot 6 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 6 of packed, glabrous red clay. They had worn out the grass, mauled the links of fence they kept running against. They were angry as he was, and almost as trapped, and as like to snap any hand that might help, but they’d never, those pitbulls, etherealize themselves, never sail through a stone springhouse wall into infinite dusk like that vast black dog he saw once, I believe. 7 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 7 ...