Whale Day: And Other Poems

OneWalking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old DogShe’s painfully slow,so I often have to stop and waitwhile she examines some roadside weedsas if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.And she’s not a pretty sight anymore,dragging one of her hind legs,her coat too matted to brush or comb,and a snout white as a marshmallow.We usually walk down a disused roadthat runs along the edge of a lake,whose surface trembles in a high windand is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.We don’t walk very far beforeshe sits down on her worn haunchesand looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.Then it’s time to carry her back to the car.Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,I realize I should tell youshe’s not really seventy-five. She’s fourteen.I guess I was trying to appeal to your senseof the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow.I mean who really cares about another person’s dog?Everything else I’ve said is true,except the part about her being fourteen.I mean she’s old, but not that old,and it’s not polite to divulge the true age of a lady.Contemporary AmericansI was trying to make my wayacross a busy street in San Francisco,while carrying the new anthology of poetryI’d been flipping through earlier that morning—with my pot of tea and two pieces of cinnamon toast—in which I was wedged between James Tate and Bob Dylanbecause the poets were arranged old to young, according to age.I had to avoid a couple of cars,cross over two sets of trolley tracks,and dodge a guy with a ski cap on a bicyclein order to get across the street and enterone of the city’s many hospitable parkswith their hedges, benches, and shade treesand often girls on a blanket, a juggler, an old man doing tai-chi.And that’s where I lay down on the soft grass,closed my eyes, and after a little whilebegan to picture the three of us lined up in a rowaccording to the editor’s wishes,sliding out of our mothers in order, one after the other,then ending up pressed together on a shelfin a corner bookstore, yodeling away in the dark.Paris in MayA teddy bear in a store window,three housepainterswaiting to cross a boulevard,a woman in a café, her red nailson a man’s nape while she smokes—what are we to make of all this?In the church of Saint-Sulpice,the Virgin holds her baby to her chestas she stands on the round earth,appearing to be unawareof the serpent she is crushing with one foot.Outside, four stone lions guard a fountain.Is this a puzzle I am meant to solvebefore the evening bells ring again—here a man wearing a newspaper hat,there a child alone on a flowery balcony?An outdoor table on Rue Cassetteseemed a good enough place to sort things out.And sure enough,after two milky-green glasses of Pernod,the crowd flowed around me like a breeze,and I found a link between my notebookand the soft Parisian sky,both being almost the same pale shade of blue.