Skip to main content

In the Dogbed

I sit in the dogbed; the dog, presumably, is sitting in mine. I am glad he understands quid pro quo.

Fortified wine slides from the water glass down my throat, sticky and sweet. From the Bose on the sideboard the Master of Song speaks like a prophet. He has been to the future, gone through the bright light, turned left at the next intersection. Gone home.

Snowflakes the size of matzah balls float by the window. Having landed, they soften the edges of the world: the barn, the house, the road past the house and the barn.

Immortal Leonard sings of death as though it were the Beloved, and he the one waiting for an embrace from his Shechinah. The tune is Baroque, and I imagine lady ghosts dancing in costume, pulled gently right and left by his magnetic voice. La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.

I am happy. Some happiness comes when ambition goes, when there is nothing left but an old body sitting in the dogbed on a day just like this.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Something About Spring

There's something about spring.... Trees and shrubs madly competing to get all their leaves out first, big, fat, lush; grass turning too green, then being outdone by the too-yellow of a carpet of dandelion; tulips burning up the near-empty garden beds with hues of deep purple and barnfire reds. It's all somehow too much. And people, too, popping out of their sealed houses, shivering in thin shirts and sandals with grim determination, trying to ignore the hard spring breeze. In all that rushing towards new life, that frenzy seemingly shared by all living things, with the swallows repairing last year's nests, and the Canada Geese squatting in the middle of the hayfield, or even by the side of the road to get the new crop of children out ... in all that there is also denial, a forgetting of what fails to return, what has quietly ceased during autumn and winter: plants that went underground and have failed to rise again, animals whose last breath rode away on the stiff winds of...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Tree

Years since it bore an apricot. Many more since it bore many. Half the trunk rotted, fallen, gathered in the windrows by the field. On mossy branches raspberries grow, making rainbows. But every spring, around my mother's yahrzeit it remembers (as do I) and blossoms in the palest pinks fiercely, profusely, fragile. Nothing will come of it, as nothing comes of me, except forgetting, except small bits of me riding away on petals on the wind.
Post a Comment
Read more

Fearman's

A cool day in October, but warm inside the car. Left turn onto Derry, then a right onto Appleby Line. Heading south, down from the Escarpment, the thin road winding past horse farms and other large properties with houses set back, dotting, as they say, the landscape. The leaves are turning. Cross the 407, and the single-family homes are replaced by large parking lots fronting commercial plazas, and mid-rise apartment buildings. Keep going south to Harvester, turn into the Tim Horton’s parking lot. Here. Clutching Tehillim I cross the road and place myself on the sidewalk next to the open gate into the compound that looks like a large manufacturing facility, many low buildings made of concrete with corrugated roofs. No windows. A chimney from which rises white steam or smoke. I can see the 18-Wheeler sitting at the intersection. I open the book. Adonai is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing. In lush pastures He makes me lie, Beside tranquil waters He leads me. Then the vehicle i...
Post a Comment
Read more