That thing when, in repose,
You get
A sudden softening, as if
You’re being folded
In choux pastry, the floating and caressing
Comfort of
Sunday evening freshly laundered sheets
It’s that, that jolt donated by
A random
Recollection of passed bliss,
Like this morning,
And the memory of dead Ginger
Our blind dog,
Tethered to the seat beside me
As I drove her home
From the Goose Green poodle parlour
And she began
To howl and yelp, in time and in tune
With me as I sang along
To Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s In Love”
Playing on my iPod through the car.
And the facts, that she went deaf
And then she died
And life is finite and endlessly
Assaulted by
Both sadness and dismay,
All that gets airbrushed out
Then hosed away from round the
Spotlit pinpoint of pure joy
And the eternity of the moment.
Wordsworth, I guess, must have
Felt like that,
Remembering those bloody flowers,
Though Ginger,
Visiting my inward eye, and ear,
with her gift of
Yowling exultation
Would’ve been
Much noisier.