So let go of
every clever, persuasive thought. To
note that the dog is clever is not to ascribe an extra clause to the
syntax of her bark, or the idea of evolution to her consumption of
cat shit. It's to say she knows how to stop me at the rock wall to
smell urine, moss, water running through the pipes. Her green leash
pulls taut and the early sun
folds her solid
ears on the sidewalk. “Generals,
dictators—we have everything,” the president tells his cronies. A
fine-tuned machine is how he describes chaos. When words are taken to
be their opposites, we do more than put them in the mirror. We bathe
them as we bathe the dog, carefully rubbing her anus to rob her of
her smell, dabbing at her ears with cotton swabs. The words shall be
clean, as Williams said of Moore's. There's good reason for
cleanliness, though it confuses the dog. Her chin on my leg as I
type, black nostrils trimmed like sails, ears
cocked for sirens on Kahekili.
--19
February 2017
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