[internautica]

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realise you didn’t paint it very well.

If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait
all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you
must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one
of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and
low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak,
you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they
will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or
someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to
speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel
you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit,
or placed behind a door—this will depend on what kind of a dog you
want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though
you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn
to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You
must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string,
or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once
you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better
to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not—
a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to
love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much
as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but
never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your
children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity;
you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how
to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk
enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show
your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog,
you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.

The classics lie to you: there is no romance
to death. I wake up, brush my teeth, and find out
that my friend has hung himself in a public park.
More brandy, please!, the living around me shout, then put
their sunglasses on. He adored this island, the red house
where the pool was covered in wasps and we drank wine
for lunch. We played chess with half our bodies in water
until we got headaches from the sun. He let me win
and only laughed when I recited Dante to him:
Nature follows--as she takes her course—
the Divine Intellect and the Divine Art...
Nature is not like art, he said, because it's functional
before it is beautiful. The black, Volcanic hills
could not sway him. Neither could the gecko
falling asleep on his feet every afternoon. He is ash
in a small jar now, or that is what science says.
Here, the river has dried out, the tomato vines
fouled. Every day the world inches closer
to ruin and still I am astonished that bones and flesh
contain the spirit, and that it can burn.
Volcanic sediment and crushed seashells
have turned the sand a tangy red, lifetimes of everything
contaminating each other. And then emptying the jar
into the clear, green water. Darling, I say to the sea,
a feeling of inadequacy rushing through me—
above us are Dante's inscrutable stars, mocking me
for my terribly human need for connection. And below
is the coast, where the waves are just waves, taking one thing
and returning another: bottle caps, warm seagrass.