The Black Dog and the Blue Ridge

I believe in his black dog because he had no taste for fiction,

my grandfather, no love for tricks

of the tongue (when his clever nurse/son called the stumps of his

Sugared-off legs “little whales lying beached

on the sheets,” it just angered him worse.)  I believe in his black dog

because he was never the star

of his stories, whenever saved lives or turned down all the millions

that liars so often decline.

Like the Gospels, in which the Apostles are so clearly schlemiels,

bad fishermen, running away,

dissing Nazareth (nowhere, Nathaniel calls it), they must

be telling the truth.  If they lied

                                             they’d have better PR.

                                         So my grandfather spoke of the soul

he saw blazed into grace.  He was late

to do chores for a sick neighbor, dawdling along picking chestnuts

(the blighted kind) up, and he turned

at a gooseneck.  The view opened.  Flames filled the neighbor’s roof

                                                                                                rippling

the clear air above.  He lit out

running, pounding his way down the ruts—chestnuts flying from

pockets, hands, hat—and arrived to find no

fire, no damage except that the man he’d been sent to help milking

was dead.

                      I believe in the black
dog my grandfather saw disappear, grizzly-big, burning-eyeballed,
that loped like a dog in the path

of his headlamps.  he braked for the black dog and saw it leap through,

not over, but through the stone wall

of a springhouse and vanish.  No tracks in the dust or in the mud.  No

disorder among the cool rounds

of pressed butter, no gap in the milkcans’ ranks, no blade remotely

like bent in the garden beyond.

In my grandfather’s last days, he’d lie on the porch, stare downstreet

at dealers’ dogs, pacing their plot

of packed, glabrous clay.  They had worn out the grass, mauled

the inks of fence they kept running against.

They were angry as he was, and almost as trapped, and as like

to snap any hand that might help,

but they’d never, those pitbulls, etherealized

themselves, never sail through a stone

springhouse wall into infinite dusk like the vast

black dog he once was, I believed.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona

Never, until we live again

where a girl can walk

to the basketball court unafraid,

among many pedestrians a pedestrian,

watching the red-tailed hawk

that roosts in bridge cable braid

swoop for its own delight

and hers, and play
a raptor-minded game

and walk back home that night

as safe as in the day,

the sidewalk crowds the same;

never, until we begin

to rise against what lurks

behind forty thousand poured

a year into Benz’s gin,

the Bavarian Motor Works,

the mouth of Moloch Ford,

those average annual dead,

will I attempt to grieve

for him in particular.

I have plenty to mourn instead.

I slap no sticky “3”

surrounded by a blur

of specious angel’s wings

on my window, no

“Gone to Race in a Better Place”

over the years of dings

scarring my bumper. Go,

buy your black t-shirts, efface

your own complicity

in his last crash. I

will admit I hold a grudge

against the whole jock galaxy,

but I didn’t want him to die

and I think you did, as much

as you want to, yourselves.

You eat the shafts

of your steering wheels. Cigarette

and gas stations pile their shelves

with his face folded, half

in love with asphalt death,

a cotton/poly blend

exclusive of decoration,

because it was no accident.

It was ritual. I won’t pretend

to buy into that rite, to pour the sponsor’s libation

at the foot of his monument.