Houdini

It was my dog who taught me
to love being alive on Earth,
to poke my nose with limbic abandon
into the good greenliness of the wild's unstudied
garden, throwing myself to the ground
under the sky and rolling on the earth as if
to get closer, to make contact with the teat
of something warm and long-forgotten:
so staggered by richness as to be helpless
and pained and greedy for the abundance
of abundance, all at once . . .

and it was my dog who taught me
to be content with sustenance and covering,
living as she did on the cheap dry kibble my father bought,
sitting quietly on the floor beside the table when we ate
though usually she had nothing for her pains,
but when she did get a bit - she had a special fondness
for bananas - she licked the very last trace
of it from the giver's fingers, and if you wanted to
anthropomorphize you could pretend it was gratitude.
She never had a bed of her own, but should a pillow
or blanket fall to the floor she would never fail
to enjoy a little luxury while it was there.

And as far as this very day,
when I bruise my senses trying to distinguish
the world God so loved
from the world that we're in but not of
(and friendship with which is enmity with God)
and I look in the mirror and see whole universes waiting in my eyes
I run to the hills
and smell the holy-incense of flowers in heat
or fallen leaves fermenting for a deep winter's
nepenthe: and the sun pierces the stained-glass
leaves of the silent cathedral, and I remember
how to love being alive on Earth.

For it was my dog who taught me
the secret of the heavens that tell the glory
of the one who created them:
to be passionately in love with the perfection that lingers
in all the corrupt and desolate things,
for this is the simplest way to love God,
and the delicate channel that nourishes all the others.