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No other man, unless it was Doc Hill, Did more for people in this town than l. And all the weak, the halt, the improvident And those who could not pay flocked to me. I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers. I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune, Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised, All wedded, doing well in the world. And then one night, Minerva, the poetess, Came to me in her trouble, crying. I tried to help her out—she died— They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me, My wife perished of a broken heart. And pneumonia finished me.

The city where I grew up was not a western city, nor an eastern city. It lay north of Bohemia, south of Greenland, below sandstone Switzerland in a river valley, green with fields. It was the dump in the middle, the rump of an exquisite gesture in stone — a suite in Hotel “Old Europe.” Stuck under layers of wallpaper, newspapers from a world gone by: reports of Zeppelin flights, League of Nations conferences, “Miscellaneous,” alongside adverts for brassieres and ironing boards. But the view to the river was blocked with gray barracks. And the southern wing, and the northern wing, broken like the Baroque Palace, furnishings given for junk. All of it somehow stranded: the steamers and churches, the domes. And not much life in the bar. But then I found it one day down on the banks, under rusty nails, heaps of nuts and bolts from machines long since dismantled, factories expropriated, torn-down, I found it amongst the bones, unearthed by scavenging dogs, ribs and vertebrae, splinters of human and beast, so it seemed — the key to the city. And found a kind of peace. And knew where I was, and where I came from — until I saw the photographs, not the ones at home in the album, but for sale on the street market stall. Archive pictures, postcards of street scenes, city views from between the wars, moments from a life gone by, some still with the stamp “original print, by hand.” Past the housefronts, all still intact, over the bridges, the broad terraces, along the Königsufer, the banks of the Elbe, people walking, all dead now, but the youngest in their prams. Mothers in dark coats and hats were chained for all time to this or that man with a briefcase. On a traffic island, a boy in lederhosen who would never age, staring from the poster for “Riquet Cocoa Chocolate.” “Alsberg Ladies Wear, Wilsdruffer Straße: the new bathing costume from Alsberg.” And the beauty in silk stockings, getting out of the tram, no. 11, picked out by chance, and her too, fixed in that spot forever. All of them passersby in time — the girl at the flower stall on Altmarkt, the one by the striped awnings on Prager Straße. At the station the clock forever at half past ten. A morning that lasts for eternity — mostly in spring, in summer, in a city that was not eastern, nor western. Scarcely a photo that ever showed it in deep snow. The sign for Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten stood by the entrance to the subway. Soon an r was missing, an n, then an a. Power cuts, petrol grew scarce, people took to bikes again after Stalingrad. Not long now and almost all of it will be erased, a phantasmagoria like the desert palace of Kubla Khan. And your gaze leaped back and forth looking for the place it all began. Was it the high tide? The moment that saw the sparkling twenties in. People peering over the railings at Brühl’s Terrace, dismayed at the rising of the Elbe. Like mourners at a wake all clothed in black. An entire people clothed in black, back then. Though the worst was behind them: four years of war in Europe, carnage. All of them losers, people suddenly with time on their hands, time to gather in dark clumps. Only a girl in a sailor suit, laughing and spitting over the railing into the swollen, mud-brown river, cold as the grave. Or maybe the storm in the thirties, that wrecks the funfair booths at the Vogelwiese fairground. Visitors watch the chaos in despair. Ghost train guests.Roll up and test your strength

It is not like going to the bank. There are no hard candies in a basket made in China, and no Kleenexes on the counter. There is no refund if someone forgets to wish you a good day. There are no chairs for the aged, no toys for two-year-olds with earaches, no supervisor to speak to in case of the Absurd. There are no meal vouchers if it takes all day, no list of local hotels with a negotiated rate. No one wants to know if you are a doctor. Plastic is not magic. Seals are not signs. Your cousin-brother’s wedding is not relevant. Hell, there is no such thing as a cousin-brother. And it is always your fault: not enough planning, the wrong color passport, the misplaced stress in a word.

The   user   interface   has   the   following   format.   Upon   accessing   the   URL, the   user   sees   a   welcome  message   with   some   explanation   of   the  service provided.  The   user  is   prompted  to   enter   his  or   her  name,  date  of  birth, When  everything  else  fails,  try  something  new. and  email  address, For instance, try the central mental hospital, then  to  left  click  on  the sit back and mumble enjoying the  belle  vue submit  button.  Based  on until  the  nurse  has  counted  you  all. this  information,  the  CGI  script Our group files  in  fresh  from  the  courtyard walk, generates “on  the a  pageant  of  male  flesh  in  ugly  dress. fly”  an  appropriate  horoscope There’s bundles of  excitement  but  little talk. reading  for  the  end  user, The  chess-players  are  breaking  out  their  chess. or  displays  the  logs No  one  to  mention  the  Afghan  War.  The  state, and  user  Statistics if crumbling, buys me my sparse and forkless lunch. the  current  user  is This  latest  novel   fails  to  kill  my  worries, the  site  admin.  Parse  CGI The  Plexiglas  window  withstands  a  teenage  a  punch. variables  (or God,  I  must  prove  completely  nuts,  by  fate lookup  logged  record) to unfit   for  active   military   service. obtain  user’s  birthday.  Parse  user’s stats,  verify   and   save   to   log   file.  Compute   user’s   Zodiac   sign   based  on birth   date.  Print   personalized  greeting.  Generate  a   horoscope  reading  and send  it   to   user’s   browser}  else  if  (user   ==   administrator)  {compute  stats.

There was a need to be weak and I met it. I appeared in the confusion between strength and surrender, as if out of nowhere, that’s the illusion. I was reared ruminating in a thicket of sorrow with a beautiful string of drool hanging out the side of my mouth like a loose phosphorescent tether. How will I know what to do, I wondered. No one does, my mother said. And then, as the drawing back of the ocean before a tsunami suddenly exposes outrageous fish on the seabed, gasping, a great inhalation placed me here panting on the sacred grass. I feel like a girl in heaven, but I am a beast in a clearing. I came to as the wind picked up and in the bay as the tide came in, what a blow to mankind, an animalcrude wind to war, toward war, untoward toward war took my breath away with it.

Dog sees white. Arctic light, the bright buzz in the brain of pure crystal adrenaline. In a flash he is out the door and across the street looking for snowshoe hares, caribou, cats. His wild ancestry ignited, Dog plunges his nose into snow up to his eyes. He sees his dreams. Master yells from the front porch but Dog can’t hear him. Dog hears nothing except the roar of the wind across the tundra, the ancient existential cry of wolves, pure, devastating, hungry. Time for crunchies. Taking many detours, Dog returns to the porch. Let master think what he wants. Freedom comes at a price.

The worst for him was his friend turned wolf, and the blood that splattered as he ran. The worst for us: the hospital, his upper lip tugged back to show the gash—the flesh halved deeply, cleanly—while I hold him for the needle that rubs pain out. He submits to the quick stitch, the thread black against pink skin, calm now he sees the doctor can be trusted, his voice soothing, his face clean shaven, the clues that signal kindness to a child. He’s worried, though, about his pet who didn’t mean it, Mom. His voice is flat. He knows the months he’s tried to woo this dog were over when it leapt for his throat and caught his mouth. The scars, at least, will be invisible. At home, he’ll sleep, big boy between his parents, till he’s sure no beast will tear into his dreams. And we will want him there, our bodies makeshift walls. We who led the stranger to our home, fixed him a bowl, taught him to sleep under our blankets, we who taught our son to rub the muzzle that sheathes the teeth.

In the dog days of summer as muslin curls on its own heat And crickets cry in the black walnut tree The wind lifts up my life And sets it some distance from where it was. Still Marco Polo Airport wore me out, I slept in a plastic chair, took the water taxi. Early, too early the voices of children Mimicking the clatter in the Internet café In Campo Santo Stefano in a place of black coffee Bordellos of verse, bony accolades of joy, Saint Stephen stooped over a cross, A dog licking his heel, blood drops from a sign By the church wall—Anarchia è ordine— The refugee from Istria gathers up nails. She will cobble together a gondola with bits of driftwood Cast off the shores of the hunger-bitten Adriatic. In wind off the lagoon, A child hops in numbered squares, back and forth, back and forth, Cap on his head, rhymes cool as bone in his mouth. Whose child is he? No one will answer me. Voices from the music academy pour into sunlight That strikes the malarial wealth of empire, Dreams of an old man in terrible heat, Hands bound with coarse cloth, tethered to a scaffold, Still painting waves on the walls of the Palazzo Ducale.

When I dare at last to imagine hunger, see farmer wandering his parched fields knowing nothing to do, finally, but sleep the day out in the barn's long shadow, dreaming of the family dog he drove deep into a neighboring county and abandoned by the side of the road. Weeks later a boy finds it in a ditch— timid and gimp, a halo of gnats festering between its swollen testicles and wormy flanks—and he coaxes it into some pines, tethers it with a tentstake and a chain as the late summer light spirals and drapes over the branches, a mirage the dog slavers and snaps at. Consider the boy's amusement as he imagines the animal jerking the light down and the ruckus of bells that clang and catapult from the treetop belfries, the canopy rent like a piñata, spilling licorice and circus peanuts, coins and fluttering dollar bills. The real possibilities are beyond him. The dog as a parable of pain or loss. Hunger as some small iridescent thing at work inside the animal, hovering around its heart the way a lone dragonfly skirts the dry pond crater, dismantling the day—light unstitched from dust, dust unbuckled from air. By now, the dog's given up, and the boy watches its tongue loll in the pine needles, the heave and fall of its stomach, its eyes following birdflight in and out of the shade. Restless for something he cannot name, he imagines the music he might make if he thumped the dog's belly like a drum. Imagines its eyes are the color of iron. Imagines the unimaginable and does it, the tire tool and the belly unwilling instruments, and the dog's caterwaul is not like music at all and when night comes the cricketsong dulcifies nothing, the dog's body is just a body, is not paltry, is not glorified. What hunger is this that haunts the boy, that haunts the man sleeping in the shade? Watch as the dragonfly dips into his open mouth and keeps going, a blur between bone and sinew, a wet thread collapsing soft caverns of flesh, gone to where his body is a field honed by sleeves of sunlight, to where the boy ceases to be and the man wakes. He knows what flits through him now keeps the time with its thrumming, carrying him away from himself into himself, to where the dog roves in the shadows— ravenous, luminous—its tail bobbing in the heat, a winnowing sliver of light.

My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it.