So when you’re with your dog all the time your imagination is changed. One afternoon in San Francisco Corky and I sat in a small park on Nob Hill watching as about a dozen people practiced Tai Chi. I couldn’t fully see them but I knew they were there. I heard the sounds of their feathers if you will. And Corky basked in the sun, stretched out at my feet. It came to me that dogs differ from humans in several crucial ways. Corky didn’t care about the number thirteen. She didn’t worry about diminishing sunlight at the end of day. No dog on earth needs “happy hour”. They don’t worry about sinister dreams or omens. “Tai Chi,” I thought, “is a beautiful, graceful analgesic, it gets us humans through the hours.” But Corky was her own analgesic. And so she did not see the need for one.
My dogified mind was undergoing natural development.
My dogified mind saw that the best of love is now.
The poet Lorca wrote: “But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists.”
Men and women are carried in their shadows, like musical instruments in their cases.
Dogs see no need for shadow or case.
Dogs see light has no bottom.
Dogs dream of daylight moving their feet beside you in the dark.
Yes because of my dog my imagination was changed.
I saw the darkness I’d worshipped in my life was just a trap.
Again in San Francisco talking happily to strangers. “You two look so happy,” said a woman in a tea shop.
She gave me a free cup of chrysanthemum tea. She gave Corky a bowl of water.
“Change is possible,” I said. She nodded.
“Yesterday morning my dog and I walked straight out of a cloud.”
Dogs are against Romanticism.
No dog believes the past is the key to the present.
No dog believes in heroic simplicity.
Corky was pragmatic, trusting, loyal and centered in our steps and stepping.
How could living with such a being not change your mind’s qualities?
Human beings have strained features, believing they’re in training for eternity.
Not your dog.
Maybe her optimism comes from her nose. She can smell vanished islands.
All things scented are still present.
Any dog’s nose is a myth preserving instrument.
Any dog’s nose reckons happiness past and translates the past.
**
We went to Santa Cruz, California and walked the seaside boardwalk.
I told my friend Ken, a poet, I was coming out of a private sphere.
“I’m learning to like the open,” I said. “It’s like Corky is turning me into the artist formerly known as agoraphobia…
Planet of the Blind 