from Startles

Startles

A big brown dog on a gurney, the other side of the window, lifts up her head, looks for her person on my side. My gaze is caught, like a vision of reddest cloth the moment after meditation. Not epiphany, which means too much, or story, meaning too little. I have been soaked in words so long, but I find none now, if words mean.

That her face was chiseled, marvelous, was not lost to me. I remarked on its beauty to the man who brought her. He’d been all the way to Waikele, where no one could see her. But this wasn’t aesthetics, not at all. Her face offered me no affect, no interpretation.

The common trigger, like a virus, is exclusion. Someone pulls it, you count it down, then the monkey enters the brain pan, scampering in its cell. The job of monkey mind, the psychologist tells me, is to make you feel alone. So there’s no monkey there, just shadows, echoes. A rope for swinging on.

You’re in the waiting room, your mind on a swing. There’s an earth mover aria on the sound system, calling out squeals and squeaks and groans. The only sense is return. The blur of it. What shutter speed could slow it down?

My husband listened to Moby Dick sped up on his kindle. It was ok, he assured me, because he could hear his own voice through the mechanical patter. A vision of Pip in a vortex comes up. A vet tech came out to lead the man toward the examination room. Lilith and I left for home.