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Black Dog

Laylage Courie

FIRST
Black dog, in this city we said would not hold us, you are holed up here in this lovely house.  Yes, I said Lovely.  But it is also empty.  And cold.  It wants a light in its middle it wants

1. familiar smells and scuffed tracks
2. a cake cut on the counter
3. a fly buzzing in the trash
4. a screen open to the murmur of rain
5. a book with a cornered page.

But I did say “lovely.”  There is room to breathe.  A whole room for nothing but breathing.  A whole room to hold his darkness as loosely as cupped hands hold a trembling moth.

 

PRECEDED BY
Six years after I last saw him, I walk into the bar for an eight o’clock film.  I see him (unchanged) seeing me (I want to say: changed).  He rises as if lifted from his seat by a groin-hooked string.  Some god more robust than time slaps my cheeks.  I blush, a long-legged sixteen years old, (mistrustful, shy) bear his embrace briefly, slump into a booth and try to tell him what I’ve lived through.  Feeling sixteen, I sound ridiculous.

 

LATER
Cigarettes, coffee, him, me, on a cement patio where gas tanks used to be.  The view loops like an ampersand through

1. foothills
2. black cherry
3. broom switch
4. pine
5. water tower
6. railroad
7. truck yard

whose watery gold snaps my heart as if it were a cane stalk (my heart gives and gives then snaps apart.)  I hear it snap with his simple answer to:  What brought you back here?  ** It is so easy.**  Voice deep and muddy, the Ocmulgee after winter rains. He uses it too sparingly.  Say something else.  I feel ready to bundle my self up and set its course, with him as companion, down any once-familiar road.

 

AFTER

What I want to do

is put my hands in your black thick hair.

What I want to do

is take your hands

the hands that play the instrument you hold in your arms

and put them

here.

Pluck out of steel strings

every unquenchable thing

(thirst, lust, the wit that hits hot coal like water)

and

yes

beauty

sad and tender

let it fray the fretwork

strip the wires

work its way out out out

a delicate cloud

of crepuscular wings

3 A.M.

 

I  watch him drive.  Take me home to the house I grew up in along this road I no longer know.  The road that runs the yardage of time we’ve known since we were born.  The road is too wide.  It switchblades great swathes of developed land where I remember there being only fields, a school, one small grocery store. 

We pass the church on the hill the steeple top scaled	The steeple top interior scaffolding scaled cold as starlight cold sweat in darkness towards darkness towards a glass door lock busted chain broken door forced open onto a decorative balcony or ledge at the top of the steeple at the top of the church at the top of the hill my hands shaking cool air, acres, acres of night.
a summer funeral	The furious glare of afternoon on the white portico school friends shuffling, joking eyes askance tossing glances at you like flowers.
His  hands in my hair	You pulled a broom out to fight the flirting ex-con brought down from the hills social charity mingling good influence they snuck us cigarettes in the Sunday school hall smells of baby powder and crayons and old mimeograph ink.  We share a pillow you, me, one con (Doug?) says “I’m a leg man myself, what about you?”  You answered “I like all parts of a woman’s body” I folded my legs up under me, sat on my feet.

LAST
Black dog.  Black brother. Companion of night of home of passing time I burn not to shed light (black dog I shed no light on the black soils of your or anybody’s night) but to brand you, this moment with you (and every other unquenchable thing) into the skins of night, the skins of the fish who arc out of darkness into light 

 

 

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