The Sadness of a Dog

Somehow pesters the sadness of

a dog—that ungiven guardedness

at first report of day

in a slyly chosen alley;

not the cat hidden in the bougainvillaea blossom,

not the bull barefaced into the lissome

highway, it’s a madness

less to do with mordant Englishness

in a glum phototropic

teat, more a perky realpolitik

in over-familiar mottled skin. That hoarse howl

at the garden’s shrub-ridden edge, that shawl

a woman knits, waiting for a man

who’s not her man—not a man at all—then

crouching by the bedpost

mewling.

When to be tame is at most

a disavowal in proxy to the master’s unacknowledged

fear: knowing fear as part of privilege,

knowing privilege a state

infeasible, the amenable innate

animal to whom

we assign the affectionate name

—Bango, Napoleon, Spot—bounding resolutely

into the black-red greenness of the middle sea—

believes itself to be human

in dogly garb, a non-veg incarnation

of mortal virtue, no less

than a wife, child, comrade in armless

charms. We nurture this notion, lure it to the rug.

So even if it steal to the street trailing a fog-

-dust deliberate, choosing mange

over matter to be free—deranged,

sheltering in a truck’s

dappled shade, but dreading the hunger-dusk

or charity at noon—if it claim its independence

among curs, dodging some dog-chief, teeth clenched,

lurking in building societies—

it still will count the hand that carries

the house in a fist,

or follow, for a glance, a humanist.

Paused between doorstep and forest, both gone;

kept in equilibrium, the sadness of a dog.

Source: Universal Beach (ingirumimusnocte, 2011)