"Spot in Space and Time"--
Spot for me was always sort of like the Holy Ghost, you know.
Given the Trinity of Dick and Jane and Spot,
the Holy Ghost is the interesting one, right,
in a way.
I mean, Dick and Jane are more, more [INAUDIBLE] de mon frère,
you know what I mean, but Spot is a third, an other thing,
a tertium quid, a rare, rarer bird.
I mean, it's one of the father and son,
you know, as relatives go, that's fairly common,
but the Holy Ghost, that's somebody
to have in the back bedroom.
That's a strange cookie to have.
So Spot sort of obsessed me and I,
I'm old enough to have had Spot in my readers,
and that's a-- so he's stayed with me all these years.
"Spot in Space and Time"--
"Despite his name, the dog's an imposition.
Lying in the kitchen, begging in the bedroom
with his lousy posture and unseemly salivation,
even Pavlov's dog exposes us, as men are known by companies
they keep.
At least, he's not exposed himself.
Thank God, it takes some clothing to do that.
The chicken in its coop, the chicken in its roasting pan,
the chicken in its place, I mean with ruffles of parsley
at its ankles, doesn't seem indecent.
Then you sit it up on the edge of a table and cross its legs,
and look, it's naked.
The indignant have a word they cannot say alone--
here, here.
The soothers say-- there, there.
The dog's confused.
He's neither fowl nor fish.
He cannot go to Esalen and find himself.
He scowls into the new communications dish.
Remember how you dropped that barbecued rib
in your lap, that casual affair in '98
where everyone wore white?
Remember how the girls were all named Faith and Prudence then?
Today, the supermarket carts are full of little Melodies
and Heathers.
Virtue's gotten mild, to say the least.
That's pretty good, the mother says, that's pretty pretty.
Grandma falls asleep, and there, the dog has had the child.
Between the looking forward and remembering,
it's hard to find a moment for the present.
I remember space from when it was a nothing.
Now, we know it's full with very little room for vacancy.
The latest limit on the emptiness was on the radio
today.
What's not, said scientists, is smaller than we thought.
Perhaps, it is the thought they're
measuring, as everything we know must
fit inside the temples, where a sky by God is understandable.
It isn't nothing we cannot imagine.
Nothing is the very stuff of faith.
It's something we've forgotten, something we are missing
in our human grade and groove.
The thinker stands still thinking of himself,
while there, in his abandoned microscope,
a million mountains move."