Sunday, March 20, 2011
My Previous Dogs
Higher-up at the vertical limit of sight;
caught on a flake of rusty guttering;
hidden in the leaves of a Californian walnut;
pressed in the middle of a waffling summer;
diphthonged at a flange in the upper-register;
flayed at a paint-crackled curl in the canvas;
alone in an attic like a cork in a gene pool,
who can see further than their next vacation,
past the landfall of mornings when you’ve awaken
out of the Valium of three am?
Derek and Brendan are laying the sprinklers
piling up the lawn down the side passage.
Professional gardeners
standing in the graves of my previous dogs.
Without my network of skills and debts
and capacious fridges that zip-lock air,
the afternoons would drag their marine-life
up an octave into slack-key,
pitched too high for humans.
Higher-up at the vertical limit of sight;
caught on a flake of rusty guttering;
hidden in the leaves of a Californian walnut;
pressed in the middle of a waffling summer;
diphthonged at a flange in the upper-register;
flayed at a paint-crackled curl in the canvas;
alone in an attic like a cork in a gene pool,
who can see further than their next vacation,
past the landfall of mornings when you’ve awaken
out of the Valium of three am?
Derek and Brendan are laying the sprinklers
piling up the lawn down the side passage.
Professional gardeners
standing in the graves of my previous dogs.
Without my network of skills and debts
and capacious fridges that zip-lock air,
the afternoons would drag their marine-life
up an octave into slack-key,
pitched too high for humans.
// posted by George Manka @ 3:02 PM 
