It’s like the first time someone who is not
your mother sees you
naked. Because you don’t know, do you, if all
your parts
are in the right place, shaped and sized
appropriately, according
to convention?—because your mother would never tell you,
which means there you are, pulling down your
pants over
what might well be a preposterous ass. So, to
my point,
you don’t know, likewise, what to do, how to
be, at these grown-up
parties, so much depending on first impressions,
decisions
about where to sit, what to drink, how long and
loud to laugh
at pretty much everything, as far as you can
tell, whether anyone
has noticed the fear-sweat creeping up the
small of your large back
and pooling in environmentally catastrophic oil
spills under
each arm. Or how, when you leave the party ten
minutes
after arriving and return home, you confront, equally
unprepared,
the task of “putting down” your dog—will it be
like it is
for the Kentucky Derby winner who breaks his million-dollar
leg after crossing the line? or like the farmer
who takes his shotgun
and the children’s 4-H pig out behind the
barn?—this dog
who can only look up at you, these days, as you
come in the door,
who doesn’t pant anymore so much as rattle, who
has seen
your ass, listened to you laugh long and loud
at Julia Child
pummeling the pastry dough, who has a thousand
times taken you
outside for a little sun, and who has always given
it to you
straight—like yesterday, when he told you that
one of you needed
to grow a pair, and since you had taken his, it
fell to you,
he said, to figure out how it was meant be
done, how death
for one could be brought about, how going on,
for the other.(first published in Gloom Cupboard, 2016)
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