Barking
 Sandra Kohler

Dogs...bark at what they cannot understand.
            Fragment 115, The Fragments of Heraclitus   
 
 
            i.
           
The desire for change, the desire for celebration,
the desire to do and to escape from doing.
There is a duty I don’t know how to assume
or accept, a process I see unfolding and can’t
touch. A day is a window, a door.  A small woman
and a large dog are walking down Water Street.
The water of the creek is mud and light. Light
is glare and staring, an eye just beginning to
open. I’m so tired I’m shaking. The sky demands
attention, the sun is annunciation, the clouds
oracles, the blue ether a veil about to be
lifted on the future. Geese going over, waves
of them, raucous clamor against blue.
Mourning doves in the yard are fat and
awkward. I’m going to bathe my body,
my old dog, take it for a walk.
 
 
            ii.
 
That fine fragile drift, grift of cirrus
across the sun changes the weather.
The sky’s dappled grayer, thicker.
An incongruity of cloud and light:
March’s blue bright cumulus decked
sailing skies, February or April’s gray
flotillas of shift and storm. I want
to be in the past or the future.
 
 
            iii.
 
A white fog of frost, dull white glaze,
the world stilled and bound by its overlay,
grip. I am Janus, looking forward and back.
How can I still be unreconciled to a reality
I saw so clearly years ago? I could not have
imagined the ways I am happy now. I dream
I’m on a small airfield, planes all around,
taking off, landing, vehicles moving; I don’t
have my glasses, my lenses, forgot them, can’t
see clearly though I’m driving a car, a small
plane myself. Flight without vision. Freedom
without clarity. The clarity I imagined I had
has not freed me. The joy I couldn’t have
imagined knowing has not freed me.
 
 
            iv.
 
I need a different season: give me the still
morning: gray, dun, yellowish, fallow, muddy,
soaked, fogged, hazed, waiting. I’m thrown
up, beached upon some shore, stranded,
waterlogged. Two finches on the porch rail,
perched together on top of one post. I need
to get to the river before the fisherman to see
the heron. I want to hide from spring’s green
flaunt. I demand that the weather change,
the earth slow down, the garden mulch
itself, the house shed its cobwebs like
a wet dog shaking itself free of water,
my life arrange itself like a dog circling
to find perfect repose. Give me
a dog’s life, life behaving
like a good dog.
 
 
            v.
 
Order, disorder, sequence.
It’s all there, disarranged: like the
beginnings of spring, sun, rain, the new
buds, on cold days the rain coming down
as snow, small flames of crocus and snowdrop,
green fire of foliage cased in ice, the brilliant
light rising out of the ice, cold fire not the heat
that will loose growth. This is the season when
the heron goes into hiding. At the river’s edge,
sniffing the air, raising his neck, his awkward
delicate feet, stiff as a skinny old woman,
he raises his head, stills, slowly unfolds the spread
of great wings, is borne on them up over
the river’s surface. He circles inland, away
from the river’s tumult, swollen by spring rain,
away from the fishermen trawling its banks,
their noisy scent, alien presence, circles over
dun lawns, muddy fields, the scrubby woods
until he smells fresh water, the hidden pond
cold, pure where he can nest, mate, ride
out spring’s tumult.

 

 

From Issue 2, Number 1

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