Post #3 - Preparing for the New Year

As I sit here on a quiet afternoon, thinking about the coming evening, I realize it's as good a time as any to re-commit oneself to one's true calling.  None of that corny 'resolution' business - just a moment in which to rededicate and put a sharper focus on desires and goals.  No doubt, Sunday morning, January 1, 2012 will be little different than any other (maybe a little more blurry and painful), but you have to ask yourself, "why not NOW?" 

That's where I'm at, professionally and vocationally, as the calendar prepares to turn, so I'm rededicating myself to my writing and making a life that revolves once again around the word.  I figured that maintaining a regular log of my thoughts (both fictional and non-) might serve as one more motivator in completing the projects that I've set for myself.  Practice of law will continue to pay the bills in 2012 I imagine, but a new year is also a good time to embrace change.  And I can feel it just around the corner ...

Anyway, while I sit here in a forward-looking reverie, here are the second and third pieces I got published.  They originally appeared in Prairie Fire (a very good Canadian literary quarterly), Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter 1992-93).

* * *

guilt

           The dog's tired, lifeless form washed up on the shore last week, lying collapsed in pebbly mud for three days before anyone noticed.  And only fifty yards from the house, imagine.  They didn't, couldn't tell him, you know.  He'd grown up with it, so they lied.  Told him it had run away, but maybe it'd come back some day and wouldn't he rather have a bunny?  He didn't think so and nodded `yes.'  At twenty-two years old it seems odd to me that I loved that rabbit anyway and I was to blame for the old, black lab going too far out into the lake.  Twelve years old and he still wanted to play fetch in the lake.  I didn't know, he didn't know about the undertow and the lab swam after the stick and I didn't see him again.  Not in my eyes, but in my head he barked and bit the watery hand that pulled him back under the surface of calm.  And the stick was in his mouth again, and then floating in my eyes, in the water, and he was barking in my ear, pleading for my help.  So I ran, he ran back to the house and they were going to lecture me, him.  Can't, couldn't tell them because he knew that the dog was too old for the lake.  And he went quietly to his room, to his bed, and the dog slipped down, went down again, dying alone.  And the tide pushed him in and they found the body just last week.

spring-loaded dog

i must be speaking Russian or maybe
Chinese, because you still don't understand
[despite the creaking, nail-biting silence in
which my sparse words drown] that i live in
the guts of a tight-wound spring.

{interlude:} 'pardon me. no amount of

explaining could ever clear this up for you. i
did not come to the phone , though i heard it
ring thirteen times. i was in the backyard,
rolling around on my back with the dog,
enjoying the sun, enjoying the grass,
enjoying the drunken ignorance of dogness
when you called.'

{returns:} in the midst of a snapping spring, hissing screams into an open eye, is a pocket; the air here is subdued, placid. you can almost taste the grass sticking to your sweaty flesh.