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.