Beautiful. He is a male Chan Marshall. Happy Friday, y’all. Enjoy your weekend… !
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We were 14 and it was summer, in the evening. We walked down the steep hill talking, 3 girls.
A dog appeared from nowhere, from the trees, and followed us to the train station. Go back, said Kerry. Shoo, she said.
The dog was an elderly golden retriever. It wagged its tail slowly, it looked at us with its milky kind eyes. We stopped and spoke to it, stroked its mild head.
We continued down the hill and the dog followed. Shoo, we said, Shoo. Then a car, a silver one, made a sharp turn and we watched as its tires ran over the dog, as if shouldering past a soft mountain. We watched as a boy came out of the car, his hands to his head and a girl in a rock tshirt screaming, her hands at her sides.
We watched and stood and I think I was holding my friends arm. We were quiet.
That’s when I saw Kerry kneel down by the dog. She held it as it shuddered. Why is it doing that, I said.
It’s dying, someone said. Why is it shaking, someone said.Whose dog is it, someone said. What do we do, someone said. The dog became still.
We went back to Kerry’s house, the one that looked like a Victorian dollhouse. We tried not to think of it. 3 days later, Kerry’s father lit up in flames.
We were in 6th period and Kerry left the classroom, her face white and pinched.
He was fixing the car, there was oil or gasoline and perhaps a cigarette and his wife saw him on the second floor window, the one with the beautiful cream cupolas, and she came wailing out of the house, and he turned to her, his head on fire like a saint.
When the police arrived, he was still alive. He told them to shoot him, he was in too much pain. And they shook their heads and looked at the ground and the sky and waited for the white ambulance.
I called Kerry for days, then weeks. You can talk to me– I’m your friend, I said, do you need help, I said. She never called back. But I kept trying, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know it was me that needed comforting. I knew that noone was exempt from violence, from swinging swords and fires, the kind of violence that changes everything in a minute, or a day or the course of a week. Remember that dog? I said to my friend. Remember how it followed us?
And that’s what I think of now, after the building that burned down around the corner filled our apt with the smell of cedar and rubber– filled the night air with smoke and sirens and fumes. I think of Kerry and how she knelt by the dog, saying, It’s allright now, It’s ok, it’s ok. I think of how she treated violence just so– lightly, lightly, stroking its brow. And how it must be the only way to be, lest it break us.
Hi everyone! I am taking a little break from blogging… summer beckons a bit… be back soon, promise…
Enjoy your weekend…!
xo,
jk
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Tiny foreign tears in autumn,
Finnish architecture! Handshaking!
The right-handed cloud is
lower than the left
where a spirit hides.
In his dwelling, Coleridge
handprints ghostly elaboration,
the notion of subject to enlarge,
he goes all year without
Word akimbo,
lined with wool, even in far off place.
*
B. Guest
*
What is origin of miscellany, misdemeanor,
from whence, doggerel?
Whose profile in margin
where small animals lie, toad, minnow, Book of Saints,
olives.
*
-Barbara Guest, Miniatures and Other Poems
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rilke
