SONG OF THE TOUCHED DOG

A touched dog wags
automatically. He
eagerly awaits
what no one wants.

He's no cat, the touched
dog, trapped in no mystery
beyond the bone he
buried by mistake.

His memory's a mine
shaft he falls into in the dark.
The touched dog is
only what you think he is,

a sleeping pet someone let
lie at the feet of man.

RETIRED

Sometimes I purposely
spend a whole week not
doing something. It could
be anything. Flying

to the moon, for example,
though not flying
to the moon's not
as exciting as some

of the other things
I don't do. Guessing
the location of every
goat in Mongolia,

for example. I don't
do that a lot these days.

THERE

Realizing how many
of the stars I see
are no longer there
makes me wary

of sitting down
on this chair,
which may
or may not be there.

THE WORDS

I always try
(we all do,
I suspect)
to mean more
than mere words
can manage.

The words
emerge
weighted down with
more than I can mean.

RUDE COLORS

What pleases me the most,
I guess, is guessing
the right answer to
the wrong question.

I prefer it to anything
vice versa, although
holding the winning ticket
to the wrong raffle

can be fun if it's
not too sunny.
If it is (too sunny),
I put my sunglasses on.

Then I eat dinner,
but only if I'm hungry.

DIVERSIONS

It recently occurred to me
that not dying is a lot
of fun. I try to do it
by not doing it as much

as I can. Other stuff
gets in the way, of
course, like golf, which
I don't play and wouldn't

enjoy if I did because
of all the sand traps
and artificial lakes.
I'd rather go to the beach

and not swim than spend
the whole day not playing golf.

MATTERING

The best part of any
act of contrition
is the pleasure
it deposits in the next

room. No one can
go there, of course,
there being no "there"
to go to. But everyone

wonders just the same.
It's as if something
that didn't matter did,
but then stopped mattering

as soon as someone
turned to look at it.