The Black Dog of the Blue Ridge

I believe in his black dog because he had no taste for fiction,

my grandfather, no love for tricks

of the tongue (when his clever nurse/son called the stumps of his

Sugared-

off legs "little whales lying beached

on the sheets," it just angered him worse). I believe in his black dog

because he was never the star

of his stories, he never saved lives or turned down all the millions

that liars so often decline.

Like the Gospels, in which the Apostles are so clearly schlemiels,

bad fishermen, running away,

dissing Nazareth (nowhere, Nathaniel calls it) that they must

be telling the truth. If they'd lied

they'd have better PR.

So my grandpa reported the soul

he saw blazing up. He was late

to do chores for a sick neighbor, dawdling along picking chestnuts

(the blighted kind) up, and he turned

at a gooseneck. The view opened. Flames filled the neighbor's roof,

rippling

the clear air above. He lit out

running, pounding his way down the ruts-chestnuts flying from

pockets,

hands, hat-and arrived to find no

fire, no damage except that the man he'd been sent to help milking

was dead.

I believe in the black

dog my grandfather saw disappear, grizzly-big, burning-eyeballed,

that loped like a dog in the path

of his headlamps. He braked for the black dog and saw it leap through,

not over, but through the stone wall

of a springhouse and vanish. No tracks in the dust or the mud. No

disorder among the cool rounds

of pressed butter, no gap in the milkcans' ranks, no blade remotely

like bent in the garden beyond.

In my grandfather's last days, he'd lie on the porch, stare downstreet

at dealers' dogs, pacing their plot

of packed, glabrous red clay. They had worn out the grass, mauled

the links

of fence they kept running against.

They were angry as he was, and almost as trapped, and as like

to snap any hand that might help,

but they'd never, those pitbulls, etherealize

themselves, never sail through a stone

springhouse wall into infinite dusk like that vast

black dog he saw once, I believe.