Afterglow_a dog memoir

by Eileen Myles

  Truly I live and die like a dog except for the Library. It’s what I know. The library is the only true monument to the writer. I think of its bowels warm. So, while I’m not against the kindle, any of the new forms our friend Mr. Booky is travelling in I’m definitely opposed to the glowing screens in libraries that want to lead me to their files, their stacks. I like the card. I like the wooden card file. The collection. I like the ancient smell of the library and its pace. It’s home. I can stay in those files for a while. They are the used bookstore inside the library. And all the handwritten information on the card. Black typing, red typing. You could explore. I learned a science fiction writer, Ben Bova, lived in my town. I saw that on a card. “Lives on Lake Street.” In the card catalogue I could view the entire science fiction category. I could read all of them. I could plunge deep into the sea and burst forth into the heavens (feeling like a god) reeling through outer space for aeons then come home. I’d be the same age but my family would be gone and it would be sad.

  My dog reached out. Often Rosie would reach out a paw and place it on my arm. I know. I’ve written myself away somehow. Yet this is what writing is. A leaving behind. A body sits on a dark orange sand chair in San Diego. If I had money I would give it to libraries and you. And all the dogs. Cause you keep protecting me from disintegration and change which is my inevitable home: ash dust and reference.

  Maybe they are only selling the paperbacks. That’s often what libraries do. Unload all that cheap rotting paper—lousy stock and probably the library has bought you in hard cover too. I’m feeling the breeze created by the fans. I spent thirty-five bucks at the book sale in San Diego. I got a trove. Smelling them. I bought the books that reminded me of my attic room in Arlington, not far from Harvard Square. The hot little airless room I shared with my sister. I read books when I was a kid because I could not sleep. My day had been stolen and I would steal it back now. I may have even been a little tired. But since it was mine to steal, to improve I would slip in another disc for instance one named Sons of the Ocean Deep. You didn’t have to go to the moon you could go to the sea. The catch to nautical sci-fi though was that we all know about drowning and it was always a possibility.

  The science fictions I read when you were dying were neither sad in a real world way or godly. It was just something that might happen next. It was close. And you were down there beside me on the floor, you smelling like corn, sweet old dried corn—rotten skin under fur in the heat and I was turning the mildewed pages of the book. The people in it were walking up roads that used to be highways old broken down ones now, and there were security systems round the houses but somehow the bad people from outside got through and killed a little girl escaping or a man, her father, a brave man died too and the remaining family would have little faith in their own survival. It was just kind of generally about “worse.” Everything we knew had broken down after something really horrible happened offstage in the book and now people just like us were going to try but probably fail. There would be big men really thick huge men who changed colors who had no race at all but all races and who would take your soul with their eyes so you couldn’t look at them and then his caress would begin a process that had been happening for aeons, like billions of years. One of them or some—he had been fertilizing women with an immensity maybe like Vince Vaughn but even huger. Imagine him Vince Vaughn (always for me a little gross) impregnating across lifetimes not just one man, one bad doctor but impregnating everyone and sometimes pretending to be a woman, say Whoopi Goldberg or Condoleezza Rice. Imagine Condoleezza Rice impregnating many men and women across hundreds of lifetimes thousands of them. For instance one day she just normally goes into the office of the farting president. He looks remote, sad. She’s a very smart woman and in this particular life, maybe an Ivy League dyke goes oh Georgie. This is their private talk. A little under it, I guess. They don’t like me he says crestfallen while sitting in a pool of his own smelly farts. C’mon. How’s about a hug she says. She has said this to him so many times but this one time it is the plan. He himself is turned by the embrace into a serpent female from another galaxy and they are pregnant for thousands of years. It is in him it has always been in him. It was the plan when his mother was husbanded by Aleister Crowley in order to let the serpent female of UX-18 into the human fold. It seems the little squirt was also the hole in the dyke. It is no joke the pun inherent in the lesbian name. A lesbian is actually a kind of punctuation a stoppage in gender in which the characteristics of one kind swirl with the other publickly. A lesbian might be supra female or a lesbian might be quasi man or both. She might be shifting and changing herself. Just to say briefly here the homosexual but particularly the lesbian blatantly reveals the deeper plan inherent in the universe and the resistance to the many levels present in the universe notably often gives rise to violence. Any culture that suppresses the lesbian will die. It is happening now the reformation of the culture because of this crucial embrace, long planned, between the midget president and Vince Vaughn, this mating at last long foretold with the Serpent Queen. Crowley was such a fool. And Pauline Pierce, mother of Barbara Bush an ambitious slut who merely wanted to write her own name large in human history and such people, well all people really don’t know things exactly but they nonetheless do see them sometimes and when she mated with Crowley she saw the Serpent Queen of UX-18 (a star you can’t imagine how far away—we call it 18—if you laid 18 universes next to each other side by side that would be just one-way—and you’ve got to return but when you are traveling these kind of distances it is entirely accomplished by mind.) Pauline Pierce saw in the distance as Crowley’s forked penis entered her quim she saw the Serpent Queen and she saw behind her a tiny boy sitting in his chair, with a lollipop in his mouth. And she saw an eagle emblem behind him and she was confused and dazzled by this vision. She wrote about it in her diary.

  Condoleezza goes gives us a hug. That was their talk. She had said this many times and the tiny boy climbed down from his chair in the president’s office and coming up to her he was a man and he needed this size, for broadcasts and cable television and for especially for this one moment (I am sitting in my sand chair in the yard) to have the millennial hug and now everyone and everything in the universe was truly gone or else (we hang thither) just before and just after. Condoleezza Rice was “now” that giant immense oozing man and the tiny president was gone and now one side of the universe for all time (unless something else happens) was impregnated by the other not just for now but for thousands and millions of years and when the child of that union finally comes to term it shall be an army and it will slay whoever is left to fight on the dear old planet earth.

  There is a war. There will always be a war but this is the war at the end. Perhaps it is happening now. Pull close.

  At this point Rosie my big eyed angel did look up and she … yes she did know and she would know even unto the night I saw the possibility of leaving no I would not go flying with you, floating out there in the grey ether surrounding your death and beyond (as if death had a lawn, its spaciousness.)

  It’s kind of ridiculous placing down my diet coke I said suddenly I stopped patting her. Overhead the fan kept turning. People on this planet are so so enmeshed in their limited understanding of gender when you know … the President of the United States who aside from any opinions you might have about his policies … the war, and Rosie nodded, and Abu Ghraib—since dogs are the original picture givers and takers of the universe. Children are too but they lose that power—most of them do the rest are unaware of what they’ve got—they might use it but they don’t know it. Dogs know. That is why it is so wise to have a dog.

  Rosie had been to Abu Ghraib and ever-so-gently nudged the soldier who took the pictures—first to take them because he knew in his gut the way they were partying with the prisoners was wrong and later (nudge nudge) to send them home though his commander kept making it be known that what happens in the Grave that was what they called the place what happens in the Gr
ave stays in the Grave but he sent his pictures to his mother who worked at the local paper in a very small town in Gardener, Mass.

  Even though the President allowed and was around so much that we know to be evil, he did seem to be a very ordinary very essential guy, an American man. Remember the joke about what he was giving his wife for her birthday and he winked lewdly at the press corps. In that moment you could sure buy in that it seems we are living in a very dumb almost charmingly frank men’s club—if anyone was just a man, our president was, yet he was a woman of destiny, the Serpent Queen, as promised in the libraries of all of cellular creation and non-cellular. Is everything alive you might ask? And a library? Yeah that’s a big question. Is everything a library too?

  Yeah and, well, no. Let me answer the first question. What do you mean by alive? Perhaps I can offer a quote here from a very famous female scientist who put it this way—if every cell in your body had a vote, you would be in the minority. [Mimes surprise.] There is no self, no “you.” There are many cells, not all are alive, but everything is in play, creating the conditions in which you are living. Now what is your question.

  Gender is tiny is the point. Human is tiny. And again Rosie nodded. I ruffle her warm thinning coat. It feels good. Yeah it feels good I growl dad-like. And I am carrying our work out alone. I am writing this up and I must be strong. Yup. I must be brave. I must not forget anything she told me. Yeah. Pat. Yeah. Pat. Yeah. Beautiful little girl.

  I asked my mother once if she thought Rosie was dad. Have I told you this before. My mother’s a very spiritual woman. I thought I’ll just put it to her.

  She said no. I said why. I would know. That was it.

  My mother is an amazing versatile charming sleeping woman. Maybe it sounds insulting but it’s not. You’d have to see her with all her plants and clocks and babies to understand my mother’s gentleness. Her greatness. She’s very soft. And butch. And she is the greatest storyteller. I think of her as sleeping through her life though you know I’m not entirely trusting the category (“Life.”) so my mother might only be walking through a minute in terms of where she’s going but in this particular performance I am her lamb, her son, and always I have annoyed her so I am obviously on a journey affecting hers unless … well sometimes I suspect my life is what she is dreaming in which case it’s good I get some rest in terms of the amount of attention she gives me. I should also qualify her sleeping … what it is is a loving—like, rhythm which is steady and warm, a gently rocking boat. You wouldn’t try and chat it up. My mother is not bland. She’s teeming. She married the man who was my father, an entirely other kind of fellow. If he was a dog he would be the tramp, with a little gay twist. My father did not project a steady sex, or a steady anything at all. But my father saw me and I cannot say on any plane who he was except that after his death he decided to come back again as Rosie because I believe he simply liked me very much.

  X3

  San Diego, 2005

  A dog shakes her way on a leash up a path and now she is gone. We see the empty path with the wiggly hurricane fence coming up on the right and a green clump of bush frogged by lighter green leaves and below it all across in the dirt where paths and slopes meet but it’s light. Light meets everything and it’s where the color goes. It’s what’s left when it’s gone.

  The dog is pooping now and it’s rude of us to watch and the dog in the arched all fours of her state, the video is grainy so it’s hard to see detail, but we see the troubled look on her face: this is mine, so go away. Her tail uplifted is black, its tip is white.

  Out of politeness the camera bounces and soon it is bouncing away. White and tan straw is surging like fireworks. The walk is melting away in the jangling camera work. And soon we’re on the path again and a common dark grey rock is as prominent and seductive as a jewel or a breast. We see dark green bushes then we’re at the gate of the park. The dog stands in profile, trees block her head. Her tail’s in the air, her shadow falls right next to her. Her entrance, the area is covered in light and the grass bright green almost yellow and all that came before, the bushes and the way have cast an enormous shadow like the path we just left and the past which is always gone.

  The dog’s sniffy and we take this as an opportunity to look up: the trees of the park and the enormous possibility of day. We’re close on the dog, just her legs and her hind parts now. And she’s further from us, turning left, her head slightly bowed (with age) her back sloped and she drags her dark leash between her legs. The leash reminds us she is a reckless untrained and impetuous dog who does what she wants. She’s freely moving, sniffing and walking slow but it’s all one kind of jangle, like a rolling awkward dance and we look up again to see the whole park. The houses and the hills looking down, the tall whitish trees and the explosion of green for smaller ones furthest away so the layered natural world holds us in place. And bars of a playground are over there a way, it’s a little unclear which way we’ll go. We’re trying to decide. More white houses and trees. We examine the park in a circle like this is a crime. Every thing is smoky and dusty which is another thing light does on a hot day when everything appears like mist. It breaks for a moment and the shadows of the trees on the bright green grass look like a spidery hand. Puffy trees bob behind the houses, the complex of telephone poles and wires the houses just arched and arched and now the dog crawls past a couple of skinny trees and dunks her head.

  She’s found a bit of food. Looks like a big clump of chicken she’s eating business-like like old people do; looking up her white face gazing. Suddenly a big mottled tree is jumping around. Flailing we see an aqua painted picnic table and it seems we’re high on the delirium of shadows paint pot wildly splashy like dark grey no green like lace all over the grass—tree to grass to tree to grass we’re bobbing landing on the innocence of the stone picnic table framed in the valley of sun in the partially shrouded park. This is her throne room and she is either dog or day. We’re forced to look at the table again after prowling away for a moment. The older trees are speckled grey a grey brown. And higher up limbs tentacles and the full mushy cascade of leaves and hazy hanging stuff something dead. We go up and up and the browner and bluer and skinnier the tree goes it seems to darken in the pale blue sky. And single strands wave and flare out like well hair or first I thought of cat’s stray whiskers the unruly ones but these are heading for the sun. Then there’s nothing but blue a box of it and back to the fence. Where’s the dog. We’re examining the beige real estate behind the chain-link fence, evidently thinking about them and what they’ve got. Not even a walk. They live at the park.

  We get her close now. In her animal-print collar. We’re right on her dipping head, the rippling muscles behind her ear, the loose hair of the older dog. It’s her view: flash of pink tongue and a lot of grass, soon there’s only grass a crew cut, and it’s black and yellow and white you can see the grade by the sunlight and shadows flashing off-on as she, waving tail and a beige butt and those loopy legs are negotiating an excited run on a good day and she circles the tree itself, rings its color and depth. For a moment you can see the marked slope of her back its weakness but quickly cause why not she’s dipping in a female pee an entire existence making the letter, mailman’s granddaughter she is.

  3. Also called transcription, or Rosie at 15.

  My Father Came Again as a Dog

  My father came again as a dog. The man named Terrence came again in the month of April approximately thirty years after his own death. No joke he came again as dog named Rosie. I titled her so. She came to me as “a tough Irish girl” and I cobbled a name for her according to that assignment. I had been attached to the dog corps for as long as I could remember. Simple liking lead me to the annals of the dog, not the horse. On television a boy with soft hair lived in the country with a furry animal with sharp pointed ears. They had their own show. In another show a gang of city kids had a being along for the ride. One that walked on all fours and a ring around his eye as if to say “seeing is kidding.” Loo
k deeper inside. Do as the dog does and the dog does it through taking pictures and sending the pictures around the universe. The team of children and dogs is the strongest link on earth and if we are to survive as a people it shall occur because of the strength of connection in the ranks of these numbers. The future army of the Great War shall be them.

  I knew I would be one alone in my family. I was in the middle, the quiet one. The receiver. I felt the tugging from the male side, and another from the female, and those were my siblings. Yet this inbetweenness, this aloneness, hear it now, is holy. I begged my parents fervently for an animal to be an army with me. My story would have moved so much faster if that dog friend had come aboard so early on. If Dog had come into my child life my father would not have needed to return. He knew this and brought me a small sandy dog I named Taffy and yet my mother returned Taffy, this male, to the ASPCA the next morning where he most likely died. His crime? That he had cried through that first long night as all dogs do. I would have learned so much from him. Get this. I would have been a prophet at 12 instead of 60. But I am very grateful to have had Rosie. And her antecedent, the man, my father. And as it stood I was alone in my family, alone in my world, my one ally in the house, the man, my father was dying. I do need to talk about, hear it, the orientation of alcoholism in order to talk about my father. As David Bowie suggested in a powerful film and as certainly Jesus Christ suggested too of the human tribe, we thirst.

  There’s a very simple reason for the thirst. We are fish. You know the earth was once covered with water and when the higher being who I choose to call Dog felt tired of being alone the waters receded and suddenly there was land. And the fish crawled to land and grew legs. Why wouldn’t Dog go into the waters and speak to the fish, in another time, why did the very essence of the fish, some of them, have to change. If you had the powers of a dog who created at least the universe and I have a feeling Dog created many universes but I don’t know how many. I am privy to a great deal of knowledge but not all. And this is the very nature of my humility. Even restraining the waters of alcoholism in my own life and I know I know less. And one would assume that Dog could do anything. But no because there are simple laws even Dog needs to obey. You cannot speak underwater. Thus there is no poetry the original speech. Dog wanted to have a conversation with man and the dogs within us. And the fish, frankly, needed to speak. You know how Dog accomplished all this. He pictured it. He pictured an earth covered with water and he pictured it dry, listen to me, and the fish going up on shore and discovering feet. Dog is lonely, we can see that “lonely” in every dog’s eyes and that loneliness is love. It causes us to do good things. Hear this. Such is the power of our army. Because the enemy of that love is dying. Every dog is fading slow returning to the waters of time which is the nature of dog’s eyes. His seeing is the sea.