made me take umbrage enough, or heart enough, to confront her?
It’s not important. My cocoon at that age was already unwinding: the threads ravel and snarl.
When I find one again, it’s that two o’clock in the morning, a grim hotel on a square,
the impenetrable maze of an endless city, when, really alone for the first time in my life,
I found myself leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems.
I’d love to know what I raved that night to the night, what those innocent dithyrambs were,
or to feel what so ecstatically drew me out of myself and beyond … Nothing is there, though,
only the solemn piazza beneath me, the riot of dim, tiled roofs and impassable alleys,
my desolate bed behind me, and my voice, hoarse, and the sweet, alien air against me like a kiss.
The Dog
Except for the dog, that she wouldn’t have him put away, wouldn’t let him die, I’d have liked her.
She was handsome, busty, chunky, early middle-aged, very black, with a stiff, exotic dignity
that flurried up in me a mix of warmth and sexual apprehension neither of which, to tell the truth,
I tried very hard to nail down: she was that much older and in those days there was still the race thing.
This was just at the time of civil rights: the neighborhood I was living in was mixed.
In the narrow streets, the tiny three-floored houses they called father-son-holy-ghosts
which had been servants’ quarters first, workers’ tenements, then slums, still were, but enclaves of us,
beatniks and young artists, squatted there and commerce between everyone was fairly easy.
Her dog, a grinning mongrel, rib and knob, gristle and grizzle, wasn’t terribly offensive.
The trouble was that he was ill, or the trouble more exactly was that I had to know about it.
She used to walk him on a lot I overlooked, he must have had a tumor or a blockage of some sort
because every time he moved his bowels, he shrieked, a chilling, almost human scream of anguish.
It nearly always caught me unawares, but even when I’d see them first, it wasn’t better.
The limp leash coiled in her hand, the woman would be profiled to the dog, staring into the distance,
apparently oblivious, those breasts of hers like stone, while he, not a step away, laboring,
trying to eject the feeble, mucus-coated, blood-flecked chains that finally spurted from him,
would set himself on tiptoe and hump into a question mark, one quivering back leg grotesquely lifted.
Every other moment he’d turn his head, as though he wanted her, to no avail, to look at him,
then his eyes would dim and he’d drive his wounded anus in the dirt, keening uncontrollably,
lurching forward in a hideous, electric dance as though someone were at him with a club.
When at last he’d finish, she’d wipe him with a tissue like a child; he’d lick her hand.
It was horrifying; I was always going to call the police; once I actually went out to chastise her —
didn’t she know how selfish she was, how the animal was suffering? — she scared me off, though.
She was older than I’d thought, for one thing, her flesh was loosening, pouches of fat beneath the eyes,
and poorer, too, shabby, tarnished: I imagined smelling something faintly acrid as I passed.
Had I ever really mooned for such a creature? I slunk around the block, chagrined, abashed.
I don’t recall them too long after that. Maybe the dog died, maybe I was just less sensitive.
Maybe one year when the cold came and I closed my windows, I forgot them … then I moved.
Everything was complicated now, so many tensions, so much bothersome self-consciousness.
Anyway, those back streets, especially in bad weather when the ginkgos lost their leaves, were bleak.
It’s restored there now, ivy, pointed brick, garden walls with broken bottles mortared on them,
but you’d get sick and tired then: the rubbish in the gutter, the general sense of dereliction.
Also, I’d found a girl to be in love with: all
It’s not important. My cocoon at that age was already unwinding: the threads ravel and snarl.
When I find one again, it’s that two o’clock in the morning, a grim hotel on a square,
the impenetrable maze of an endless city, when, really alone for the first time in my life,
I found myself leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems.
I’d love to know what I raved that night to the night, what those innocent dithyrambs were,
or to feel what so ecstatically drew me out of myself and beyond … Nothing is there, though,
only the solemn piazza beneath me, the riot of dim, tiled roofs and impassable alleys,
my desolate bed behind me, and my voice, hoarse, and the sweet, alien air against me like a kiss.
The Dog
Except for the dog, that she wouldn’t have him put away, wouldn’t let him die, I’d have liked her.
She was handsome, busty, chunky, early middle-aged, very black, with a stiff, exotic dignity
that flurried up in me a mix of warmth and sexual apprehension neither of which, to tell the truth,
I tried very hard to nail down: she was that much older and in those days there was still the race thing.
This was just at the time of civil rights: the neighborhood I was living in was mixed.
In the narrow streets, the tiny three-floored houses they called father-son-holy-ghosts
which had been servants’ quarters first, workers’ tenements, then slums, still were, but enclaves of us,
beatniks and young artists, squatted there and commerce between everyone was fairly easy.
Her dog, a grinning mongrel, rib and knob, gristle and grizzle, wasn’t terribly offensive.
The trouble was that he was ill, or the trouble more exactly was that I had to know about it.
She used to walk him on a lot I overlooked, he must have had a tumor or a blockage of some sort
because every time he moved his bowels, he shrieked, a chilling, almost human scream of anguish.
It nearly always caught me unawares, but even when I’d see them first, it wasn’t better.
The limp leash coiled in her hand, the woman would be profiled to the dog, staring into the distance,
apparently oblivious, those breasts of hers like stone, while he, not a step away, laboring,
trying to eject the feeble, mucus-coated, blood-flecked chains that finally spurted from him,
would set himself on tiptoe and hump into a question mark, one quivering back leg grotesquely lifted.
Every other moment he’d turn his head, as though he wanted her, to no avail, to look at him,
then his eyes would dim and he’d drive his wounded anus in the dirt, keening uncontrollably,
lurching forward in a hideous, electric dance as though someone were at him with a club.
When at last he’d finish, she’d wipe him with a tissue like a child; he’d lick her hand.
It was horrifying; I was always going to call the police; once I actually went out to chastise her —
didn’t she know how selfish she was, how the animal was suffering? — she scared me off, though.
She was older than I’d thought, for one thing, her flesh was loosening, pouches of fat beneath the eyes,
and poorer, too, shabby, tarnished: I imagined smelling something faintly acrid as I passed.
Had I ever really mooned for such a creature? I slunk around the block, chagrined, abashed.
I don’t recall them too long after that. Maybe the dog died, maybe I was just less sensitive.
Maybe one year when the cold came and I closed my windows, I forgot them … then I moved.
Everything was complicated now, so many tensions, so much bothersome self-consciousness.
Anyway, those back streets, especially in bad weather when the ginkgos lost their leaves, were bleak.
It’s restored there now, ivy, pointed brick, garden walls with broken bottles mortared on them,
but you’d get sick and tired then: the rubbish in the gutter, the general sense of dereliction.
Also, I’d found a girl to be in love with: all
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