The
Dog Pictured on Google Maps in Gouvy, Wallonia
by John Doyle
Some of me— lying here— eaten by a window's curious
physics
seeks more of me, a blues-singing torso,
knees an aggregate of whatever way oily sheets need to cannibalise
me,
all pig-white and crazy tulip breath
breathing sin's smoke, exchanging vows
with a cowering tree—living on my garden's dim corrections.
Eventually night calms to a car's bleating engine,
hypnotised in a street of an age
nightfall fails to regret.
Was it Chaplin's final movie, when he waited for death to
fit the biology
of his casket?
At the badlands of summer bedrooms
light and sweat and the sepia Lolita
imagine a future's windowpane
stooped back in awe
at a blind-eared prizefighter,
a terror of trumpets,
a prophet on the mountain in stockings and suspenders
showing his tantalising thighs to hoodwink a car,
which, before the war (war #2,279)
taught its engine terrific peace?
Perhaps it was symbolic
there's no temperature at night,
heat slumbers on ice watching things become occult mirages:
a swollen scorpion's alibis, a period of hours coloured by
the dreams of
wart-addled clocks;
Martina, my meals on wheels go-between jets off to a brand-new
fridge today
her bedazzled boys
wrangle war-torn microwave lasagna from. Need I go on?
I've forgotten how I got here.
Why I wait around to learn these things doesn't matter.
I pluck broken stones from my carnage of mud,
stupid as to how broken they remain,
but tender is a stone, it's soft with its stories,
I watch their giggling theory spook fire brigades
to the archeologies of town: Easter is peaceful time,
granite winds shorn,
proud of the bastard, proud of the movie crews
crawling the beaches in scarlet.
The limits brought to me make mirrors bludgeon ghosts whistling
in a fire.
Fine by me. I hate ghost stories:
I love dogs however—most dogs—two on the peripheries
of Berlin's nightmare
I feel contempt for, mine I would drink the waters of the
Styx for,
and that dog in Wallonia Belgium—
that dog too, panting mysteries up that hill,
watering down the furnace
of eternity's leaf-wrinkling ghost
John Doyle is from County
Kildare in Ireland. He returned to writing poetry in February 2015 after a gap
of nearly 7 years. Since then, he's had 10 collections released, including
Leaving Henderson County, in 2020, and A Word in Your Fear in 2024. He
is writing his first novel at present and works as a librarian.
