“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.”
— Gil Scott-Heron
The dog stood at the entrance to a rabbit-run, his whole body alert to possibility. He sniffed and watched the brambles. And standing there, on the trail, I watched him as the sunrise cast those pastel colours, gilding the dry winter grasses, steaming frost from the ground. The distant mountains looked like they belonged on a label pasted to a cheap wine bottle that you would scratch and peel as the evening dragged and conversation veered from small-talk to small-flirtation. And you smiled, even though your hair smelled like smoke, and you wanted to be anywhere else. You were that uptempo song with the sad lyrics that might make people cry if they could just stop dancing for a minute and really listen. And, in that moment, as I bristled against the morning chill, I wondered where you were.
We inaugurate the evening
Just drumming up a little weirdness.
It gets late so early now
The waves come in in mountain phases
Linked impossibilities,
Branching possibilities.
I’d see fire where it’s not supposed to be,
In the empty library at suppertime
By the respirating basement door.
The dog eats out of an old tambourine on the floor.
I’ve been told you can live a long, long time on the love of a dog
And that things get bitter and bad
When the people are wrong
And sleep can be had for the price of a song,
Late in the day when the options are gone.
When the seatbelt’s the only hug you’ve felt in weeks,
When wrong numbers are the totality of your social life,
The obscure strategies of wildlife
Only flummox the hell out of you, kid.
I first saw her in a megastore,
The Day-Glo raven
Born into a free fall
Like plastic Easter basket grass
Falling from an overpass,
The fulfillment of a tenth grade prophecy,
A motel masterpiece.
Blind to the branching possibilities,
Blind to linked impossibilities,
Teardrops were standing in my eyes
Like deer before they bolt.
It was like I was stretching my arm through the cat door to heaven.
I was thinking, I could lick the frosting off these summer days if the nights were half as sweet,
Me like a banged-up dog walking half sideways.
I adored the way she modified my mornings
When I’d wake up in the calm shores of her bed,
Somersaults and smoke in a universe of sleep,
Before she slipped into her heritage and disappeared.
Now every second thought is out of control.
I guess in a way I long to be rad.
When I was with her it felt wrong to be sad.
Did I tell you an angel finally came and shut my mouth?
There was a smile and a tear in her voice too
And she taught me to relight,
Relight and relight again.
They tell me you can live a long, long time on the love of a dog.
Things get bitter and bad
And sleep can be had
Late in the day when the options seem gone.
Please let your eyes be a friend to me again.
It’s just malfunctioning teardrops,
Cowboy overflow of the heart.
– “Cowboy Overflow of the Heart,” David Berman w/ The Avalanches
In the morning, gangs of corellas teem across the sky. Disorganised. A welter of screaming white cockatoos that can be heard approaching long before they pass overhead. The corellas gather like delinquents in the carpark of the feedstock company on the other side of the railway. They clumsily strut and hop around the bitumen collecting the spilled grains that are lost from the silos when they load the trucks. Later in the day a pair of timid rosellas collect grass seeds from the chaff of our dead lawn until they are startled and disappear into the parched distance.