A Dog's Life
by Ursula Pflug
 

This poem has been previously published as “A Dog's Life” in Freezer Burn # 7 (April, 1997) and as “Alligator Wars” in Rampike, Propaganda Issue (1985-6)

1.
Half of his ground floor was taken up by televisions.
Sometimes he turned them on:
two, three, or twenty of a hundred,
until the room was lit blue as an aquarium.
He moved slowly, smoking,
repeating again and again his circuitous route through the stands
of radiant, charming screens.
They were like trees to him then:
shimmering poplar, incandescent birch.
Untouched by all the life of life, they were,
to him, possessed off more.
They became imbued with all the quietly hurrying
from one place to another of capillaries,
the clever hurtling of electric messages from brain to hand.

2.
He was a fish,
haunting the transparent sides of its tank,
believing, as fish believe,
that one day they would open out,
would bloom like a blue flower,
allowing him to pass into the oceans of the world.

3.
Once he saw Melanie.
She was hurrying across a busy city street he didn't recognize,
carrying a parcel tied in string.
He called her name until he remembered
the people in the television never could see him,
they just told him news of the war.
There was always someone new telling him about the war,
although there was nothing new about the war itself.
Like the televisions, it just went on.

4.
He sleeps on a cot in the hallway,
dreaming that the war is between human beings and dogs,
and he is a dog.
As a prisoner of war he is kept in a large cage
and threatened with torture if he doesn't talk,
which is difficult to do,
being a dog.
On the first Wednesday of every month Melanie comes to see him,
if she can get through the border patrols.
He looks forward to her visits,
and grovels doggily when she arrives.
She almost always brings him something nice to eat.

5.
The rusty chains rasp at his neck.
The white robed doctors with their click-click heels
and cool sullen blondeness poke things into his ribs;
long sharp needles sink into the tender flesh of his inner thigh.
He doesn't even growl.
He looks steadily into their pale eyes,
masking his mad dog cleverness and cunning
behind a beaten, docile, tame dog face.
With his left hind foot he hides her gift,
a little something to gnaw upon,
a piece of flesh she has cut from herself,
with little bits of her blood still on it.

6.
Once she couldn't get through for three months,
but when she did,
she was all breathless and frayed,
wild and tired looking,
the way he loved her best.
She brought him a picture of the moon.
"What is it?" he snarled. "I can't eat it."
"It's the moon. You remember the moon."
"Yes." And he remembered how to howl.

7.
When she is gone he looks at the moon,
and dreams of changing his form.
He dreams of the breathing of oceans,
of the breath of the moon on an empty shoreline,
empty a long time now,
but for the sticks and stones and televisions the storm left there.
The televisions are all imploded,
like skulls caved in on themselves.

8.
He dreams that he is a man,
wearing a dog mask,
and that when Melanie comes he shows himself to her proudly.
"I am a man."
"You poor old mutt, you," she says,
reaching between the bars to scratch his ears,
and he bites her,
because she is right.

9.
Why was she afraid of the dog?
Melanie broke open her last pack of cigarettes
and switched the channel back to the horror movie.
Where did she know the dog from?
He scared her,
but she still liked him more than the humans he slaughtered,
ineffectual and preyed upon.
She tried to laugh,
but the dog pulled her to another place,
beyond laughter,
where she knew his TV story was her own.
He tugged at her memory as though it was
a toy duck on a string,
leading her down long twisted hallways
to the bathtub of remembering.

10.
She had dreamed the dog.
The nightmare had wakened her.
A man in a dog mask had stood at her door,
his wooden teeth
dripping blood and saliva.
"What are you doing here?"
she had demanded.
"Get your mask," he'd said. "You'll need it to rip through."

11.
She watched the continuation of her dream,
cigarette hanging from a curled lip.
Her lip curled further,
she snarled in empathy for him.
When she thought she felt fur on her hands she understood;
we are the people inside the television,
trying to bust our way out.