jesus said, “hey,
what you doing here hiding in the water from the draughts in the gap-filled
room,
where the tub is white and hard,
and your daughter sleeps in the other room?’
so I got out of the tub and went into the oak room
with the round blue rug
upon which the black dog sleeps
so he, too, fell to sleeping on the blue round rug,
where the black dog breathes deep between fits of nightmaring,
after long days chasing through frost
fell from the boxing jowls of the lantern-head horse,
where my daughter first made mountains of roans.
I found jesus too,
outside
mornings,
in the dark
with the dog behind the trees under the waning moon,
when the rich blue night was the bottom of the ocean
upon which me and the dog slept.
jesus said, “hey!
i’ll sleep here until the end of the day,
i’ll sleep here until you also,
arise,
and sink to the bottom here with me,
to the bottom where no breathing occurs.”
He remembered to me my grandmother madrid,
at once teaching me about love and hate and the hail marys
and writing “our father . . . “
i,
too busy on the rocks and in the air,
i never listened, will never care,
“so you too will sleep with the dogs at the bottom of the ocean and
I will see you there.”
