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SIRIUS RISING
for Linda Horsley
She is the mind which thinks us,
we are the thoughts that she thinks.
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS
It's said Pythagoras, certain no soul
is merely snuffed, led his hound to his friend's
deathbed that the dog might catch and inhale
the dying breath: better the freed soul
inhabit so noble a creature than some less
domestic beast. Since I met you, women
glimpsed coasting the dairy counter,
opening the door of the bakery, sitting
in conversation at the tables across the street
have lost all their loveliness, and I have paid
more attention to dogs. Ugly dogs at that,
mutts that scavenge the alleys of Pompeii,
the color of the earth, greyish, yellowish.
Scruffy cousins to the Egyptian dogs
and hence to jackal-faced Anubis,
they snap at the hooves of oxen hauling
debris down the rutted Strada dell'Abbondanza
where you stride along the raised sidewalk
turning into the Strada dei Teatri on your way
to the Tempio d'Isigi. With these Italian names
history ends, and I am entering with you
a place made by mythographers and those
who dream. These are days of canicola ,
the stagnant air of midsummer simmering,
dog days inviting perpetual siesta. I too
have stretched in a patch of umber shade,
tongue lolling, twitching at flies. The bones
I'm too lazy to bury. The windowless walls
are red and ocher, doorframes crayoned blue.
The sky is blank. Vesuvio trembles. Or is that
thunder? When I dream, I do not dream as dogs
dream. I have planned the mise-en-scène
for years. You stand silhouetted in the doorway
of the purple-shadowed Temple of Isis,
crowned with a feathery yellow auriole
of blossom from the lithe linden-tree
for which you are named. Against the sunlight
the cotton of your dress flames
like begonia petals. What is this wreckage
of a man on the stone table? Brother,
husband, son of the Great Goddess,
he who exited, stage left, into the jaws
of the Great Black Dog who swallows all that shines.
Now we have entered the gurgling belly
of the otherworld. Here, I am the midnight
scavenger of alley trash. Behind those
screened windows, half-empty beds sweat.
So I lick the brown stain from the city sky,
and there is Orion stalking the red-eyed Bull.
There at his heels, low on the horizon, trots the Dog.
Over their heads flows the milky River of Souls.
And here comes the new moon in black-face,
masked Harlequin, king of shreds and patches,
like Herakles, founder of Pompeii, wielding his club.
Now, clouds heap over the rooftops, and the heavens
are canceled. In the Casa del Poeta Tragico
it is written: Beware of the Dog. But Sirius
has risen. Those who eat at the stone table
smile in the shuddering gloom, the blood
on their fingers turning to powdered gold, for you
(so I would have it ) are delicately piecing
the thirteen glittering fragments of the broken
god. Panting Anubis grins at your side.
The thunder breaks. The city fills with ash.
   
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