So I'm going to read you some new poems.
I might read one from a previous collection,
but I've been working on this new book that's
actually about my neighborhood in New York City.
And if you're going to choose a microcosm,
that's a pretty interesting one to look at
to see what it might reveal.
When I started writing these poems
I didn't know that's what I was doing,
and this one sort of opened the door.
It's about a dog named George who--
hmm.
I forgot how to do this without making it spill.
George entered my life as part of a new relationship
and left when that relationship ended.
The first-- the title of the poem
is the beginning of the first line.
It simply flows right in.
It's called "Little George."
And I have to figure out the right distance for this.
Little George looks-- little George barks at whatever is not
the world as he pretends to know it: trash sacks, hand trucks,
black hats, canes and hoods, shovels,
someone smoking a joint beneath the Haitian
Evangelicals' overhang, anyone--
how dare they-- walking a dog.
George barks.
The tense, white comma of himself arced in alarm.
At home, he floats in the creaturely domestic:
curled in the warm triangle behind a sleeper's knees,
wiggling on his back on the sofa, all jelly and sighs,
requesting/receiving a belly rub.
No worries.
But outside the apartment's metal door,
the unmanageable day assumes its blurred and infinite disguises.
Best to bark.
No matter that he's slightly larger than a toaster,
he proceeds as if he rules a rectangle two blocks deep,
bounded West and East by 7th Avenue and Union Square.
Whatever's there is there by his consent,
and subject to the rebuke of his refusal--
though when he asserts his will, he trembles.
If only he were not solely responsible for raising outcry
at any premonition of trouble on West 16th Street,
and right on the pavement, might lay down the clanking armor
of his bluster.
Some evening when he's climbed the stairs
after our last walk and whines and rounds the landing turn,
and turns his way toward his steady sleep,
I wish he might be visited by a dream of the world
as kind, how any looming unreadable
might turn out to hold--
the April green of an unsullied tennis ball?
Dear one, surely the future is not entirely out to get us?
And if it is, barking won't help much.
But no such luck Not yet.
He takes umbrage, this morning, at a stone image
serene in a neighbor's garden, and stiffens and fixes
and sounds his wild alarm: damn you, Buddha, get out of here,
go away.
I read that poem a summer ago in London at the London Buddhist
Institute, and had forgotten that I
was standing next to a nine foot golden Buddha.
Happily, the Buddhists were very tolerant.