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City Dogs
Just this New York morning they're everywhere, in parks, running with the runners around reservoirs, up & down windy canyons riverstreets, trotting with rollerbladers & flipping with the frisbees & Great Lawn acrobats - nostrils pumping, ear flaps erect & eyes rolled back, endlessly sniffing out the metaphysical possibilities in the simple walk after dinner where every tree is an investigation of the sublime, nothing foul enough to satisfy their instinct for heresy - aloof, bemused & ecstatically enthusiastic mixes of every imaginable kind, fancy over- fluffed pedigrees prancing toward pedicures, Saturday afternoon perambulations in Village runs, or Sunday morning powwows in Central Park, where, let's face it, you see ordinary hounds so overtrained in culinary arts they're epicures of the ethereal, estheticians & fabricators of everything architectonic, fungivorous purveyors of municipal etiquette so sophisticated in diplomatic backlicking they personally appreciate every corroding scent of every mile of everything exuberant- yes! they love to feel the city on their paws, that pulsing beat of refrangibly delicious whines & salutations, helloes & goodbyes, the subway's plaintive eulogy to all that's passed & forgotten so deep beneath our refined relapses, not to mention cacophonous rattling transformations of subterranean desire, the recessive circles of time, no, yes, these munificent beings are never imprisoned by ideals, never molested by subterfuge or blindsided by impious dreams of grandeur, instead: they feel their lives vibrate through their limbs like sonic booms, constantly inhaling truck-and-bus-and-car fumes like true citizens of the upper underground, peripatetic city-dwelling native American sophists nonpareil they have, so to speak, their nose to the ground, while we, napkin-users of somewhat discrete inclinations, with all our inelegant acquisitions, trot happily behind-oh how I envy them their recherché snouts & self-obsessed tails counting millimeters of delight, sniffing at every passing crotch with nothing to lose but another slice of humble-pie, here, once again, I'm following a mixed breed named Benya & a relentlessly energetic smooth Fox Terrier named Gus through every deadly sin & various bad humors, stretched & yanked against all the unnatural restraints of... call it civilization or the light at the end of salvation that is this great junglegym of over-reaching we've somehow imprisoned ourselves within-this city life, this maze, this unannealing shout & unfurling spray of indignity in which each moment is an opportunity for celebration wherein our tolerance for ecstasy is tested hourly & apparently only dogs behave with proper humanity so let's bow our heads & honor every living thing Amen!