The Sadness of a Dog

Somehow pesters the sadness of a dog—that ungiven guardedness at first report of day in a slyly chosen alley; not the cat hidden in the bougainvillaea blossom, not the bull barefaced into the lissome highway, it’s a madness less to do with mordant Englishness in a glum phototropic teat, more a perky realpolitik in over-familiar mottled skin. That hoarse howl at the garden’s shrub-ridden edge, that shawl a woman knits, waiting for a man who’s not her man—not a man at all—then crouching by the bedpost mewling. * When to be tame is at most a disavowal in proxy to the master’s unacknowledged fear: knowing fear as part of privilege, knowing privilege a state infeasible, the amenable innate animal to whom we assign the affectionate name —Bango, Napoleon, Spot—bounding resolutely into the black-red greenness of the middle sea— believes itself to be human in dogly garb, a non-veg incarnation of mortal virtue, no less than a wife, child, comrade in armless charms. We nurture this notion, lure it to the rug. * So even if it steal to the street trailing a fog- -dust deliberate, choosing mange over matter to be free—deranged, sheltering in a truck’s dappled shade, but dreading the hunger-dusk or charity at noon—if it claim its independence among curs, dodging some dog-chief, teeth clenched, lurking in building societies— it still will count the hand that carries the house in a fist, or follow, for a glance, a humanist. Paused between doorstep and forest, both gone; kept in equilibrium, the sadness of a dog.