Dog in the Manger

Thunder has driven us
where darkness interprets the animal-
under the shears and the picture frames,
the gardening-gear in the cellar-
to a furnace in banded asbestos
ticking its water-drop sounds,
mop-cords of hardening naphtha,
pulverized ramshorn dung.

There, lives the crazed and unkillable
gift of her vigilance, the creaturely
fear that tightens the line of her jawbone,
while her fangs in their tortoise-shell
markings draw me into her skull
in a shine of bitumen,’
and we know ourselves frightened. We are stopped.
We look back toward the pillars

of garbage alive in the working aluminum,
storm-windows stacked, copper
and iron and oil, the gout of the gas
honing its tooth with a midsummer
midge’s sound, to the troglodyte’s world
that lies under the world of the human.
The house that she carries somewhere
on her back-a totem

of excrement, a shipwreck
of clapboards and shutters, an ark
that boils on the froth of the gutters-
rises and falls on its drains,
while we watch for some presence
that troubled the waters. The darkness is heavy,
with a smell like a spade’s wedge.
Our spittle is dry… We ride over the edges together

and I call through the darkness:
Here, Daffy! Here, Daffy!