On Cuteness and Contradictions: How to Be Foolish and Rescue a Puppy in Your Twenties

It was a very delicate moment: the kind that can only happen at the end of October, when the air is thick with a crisp lightness. Even then, I wasn't sure why this small, intricate blush of gold seemed so significant. The soft petals of the buttercup cracked the greyness in a way that felt like sunlight. The stem hummed to itself, nestled between and above concrete slabs. The flower reminded me of my life in a then-profound but now-absurd kind of way, because it insisted on growing at what was undoubtedly the worst time of year for it to grow. This singular blossom symbolized, in all of its frail glory, the beauty and joy that could exist in a world tumbling towards winter.

That is, until the puppy ate it.

It was essentially the stuff of myth and legend. Finneus romped toward the flower—all legs, jubilant, ears flopping in the wind like mudflaps on a clown car—and time slowed to a near-halt. At ten weeks, Finneus was faster than I have ever been, didn't speak English, and certainly didn't care if I had feelings. Resistance was futile. The flower's short life came to a tragic end.

This occurred during Finneus and I’s first afternoon together. I was confident that the entire incident was a bad omen. For the following two months, if asked to describe him, I would explain that his fur was the color of dung beetle wings, that his eyes were the color of dead tree bark, and that his feet were dustier than a spaghetti Western set. Rescuing him from an animal shelter was one of the most complex and stress-laden choices I have ever made.

Many people have experienced the phenomenon of adorable puppies. What few will tell you in subsequent conversations is that their baby teeth are sharper than approximately anything: nails, bayonets, a stack of pencils mere hours before the SATs. Or that puppies become a kind of furniture-barnacle as adolescents, clinging onto any and all possible surfaces.

Caring for a pet forces you to become acutely aware of the needs of another living being without judgment or irritation. You do not raise a dog with the hope that it will shuttle you from the retirement home to your annual bingo tournament, favorably grace the cover of a major news publication, or grow into your high school prom dress. You do it because you would like to learn to see splendor in the eye of a destructive, furry tornado. Embracing the responsibility and opportunity that accompanies nurturing an animal is extremely challenging, particularly for someone emerging from the hazy ether of academia or searching for the ‘right’ career. It isn’t all holiday-themed dog outfits and quirky treat flavors, as social media might have you believe. It’s tough. Puppies are a kind of chomping, slobbery, handsome love. They are hungry for all that you have to give, and will teach you to give both that and more.

Another june poem!

Extraction

It is a well-known fact that wisdom tooth removal is best completed between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. There are three reasons for this. The first: probability of impaction. The second: probability of infection. The third, a combination of the two: hoards of tiny fairies, gnawing at sprays of raw tissue and a forest of pink mouth stalactites, will hungrily spill towards freedom.

Their servitude—dousing pliable young minds with piles and plentitudes of wonderings, strange nightmares, the stuff within blinks—somberly comes to an end as the molars reveal themselves.

The how of it: the enamel begins to slacken just so at seventeen. The inner tooth begin to dance and shake with tiny spots of light. The quiet intrusion of these pore-sized glimmers is a shocking acupuncture between real and real. At first, the fairies are wide-eyed, confused. They slow the pace of shoveling reverie to sinus, curious at the incursion, sugarplum droop to their wings as anxious fingers pry pulp from prison wall for a better view of what might be.

As the layer between pixie and person thins, their ambition becomes less concentrated. Startling windows widening, time scratching at the pale panes, the daydreams begin to oxidize. Ambitions once thick with intent, muscular with a whimsical academy taught only in dreaming, atrophy. Their nests dew with dust. The fairies stumble toward a caustic light, squinting at parades of birthdays and funerals stubbornly marching past.

If left untreated, the pain of this process will grow insufferable. The harsh feathers of fairies can snatch and slash all skin to shreds. They will push out and beyond in search of freckle-sized flight with no recollection of the delicate universes they once cultivated. They are very cruel.

The wisdom tooth whines softly as it is pulled away; a barren thing no one is encouraged to keep under a pillow.  It is a closed museum, demolished on the petal of the tongue—once a pinhead atlas for the imagination’s inarticulate souvenirs. It is the most beautiful place: the crux of the human root.

june poem

Revamping an old prose poem.



Letter for your dying

            I want to make you understand how the natural collects the divine.

You cannot see it, and so I will show you.

This is the evolution of proper noun to something more tangible. Your desperate chromosomes shying through goodbyes… the condensed cadence of your breath, of water slipping through fingers. Your frame reminds me of husked coconut, of the startling juxtaposition between flesh and meat, of what is seen and what is valued.

It is a beautiful and simple thing. There will be no elaborate transition–no Egyptian severance of body from soul. It will take four minutes for the air to leak from your lungs, like a chimney bleeds spring-smoke. A skin-slacking canvas will spread from tooth to toe, the story writing itself on your body: legible as braille, as etchings in stone, as Morse code. When your spirit departs, it will be through the pores. It will be from under the fingernails, or the tongue. The process is less like a parade down a crowded street towards the sea, and more like the froth of fresh, escaped champagne. No time is lost. There is no time to lose.

Dusk is breaking against the horizon, and slowly retreating into the ground. Dye does this below wet looms. Moss does this to the rocks it consumes, and barnacles to their ships. Quietly, they steer—navigating past all rough patches. They eat and eat and eat. The direction of consumption controls the Earth. You will become an impossible litany of eaten things because that is the only choice that anyone has; no choice at all. Oceans and ashes and fires and flies: all they ever do is stumble and rattle about, blindly consuming.

Osmosis will allow the rain into your soft bed-bones. You will be the most beautiful and exotic biome. The most ornate empire abandoned; enzymes having collapsed upon themselves after a century of making. All bodies lose the war, and want to lose it. They sap themselves dry, scream until raw, and whittle their maps down to dust.

The clouds eke and fade with brilliance. I am reminded of veins easing radiance out of the heart, pushing it toward the extremities. Somehow, you fray there like a palace’s worn carpet: inexplicably regal. This is a dance entrenched in the feet from birth—evidence that a body can so thoroughly forget and remember at once. It is a wonder. Your unbecoming is by far the most becoming of selves, and I am a small, jealous bird building a nest of your dying. Singing a song of it in my brittle bones that seek to articulate so much, but only ring of wind.

I am so sorry, and yet so full. In moments like this, no one breathes—we wait to be breathed, and that is enough to sustain us.

Decompress. All I really know, all I can really promise you, is that you are no longer uppercase.

February 1st, in which I make up for lost time

I suppose I can afford to be somewhat liberal in what I write here. I am not confident that it is read by anyone but robots. It is possible that these robots are highly intelligent. Hello, friends.

You know that you have been away from the ocean for far too long
when you start to hear its prose in the brash lull of the dishwasher.

The trouble with being conceited enough that you spend a substantive amount of time in your own head is that you come to realize exactly how lonely you are (in the cosmic sense, such that it does not elicit vulnerability) and exactly how little that conceit actually means. It feels like punching a pillow, or crying in water. The body is a pillow, and slowly but surely, we are punching our way out. The body is water, and slowly but surely, we are crying our way out.

Neither of those metaphors is a stretch, really. They aren't even up to my normal standards of the bizarre. I guess an atrophied muscle is a dull muscle.

I miss being in writing workshops. I need them to regularly produce. Is that so wrong? Why is it a delegitimizing characteristic to so many... to need others? It's why there are words. Words, words, words. Shakespeare, you fantastic idiot, you've invested yourself in an alchemical device and you will never be the same for it.

I'll cut to the chase. The most horrifying and liberating thought, to me, is that it is all prologue.

February 1st

In a murderous time
  the heart breaks and breaks
     and lives by breaking.

             --Stanley Kunitz

Take Two

Re-initiating this blog during my final exams was somewhat ill-advised.

Be back--for serious--next Wednesday.

december 3/4

To thrust all that life under your tongue! --
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

--anne sexton, february 3 1964