Man With a Dog's Head
       

A man with a dog's head has difficulty
            finding a hat that fits
and is also fashionable
            and does not blow off easily
when he darts away in a fit of curiosity.
            A man with a dog's head has difficulty
sipping bourbon without making
            a mess of his white linen shirt.
A man with a dog's head has mastered
            one syllable words but cannot
contort his jaw to fit longer ones that
            better express his thirsts and desires.
A man with a dog's head has many
            thirsts and desires, first and foremost
the thirst and desire for companionship,
            to be loved despite the dark cloud
of pessimism that perpetually hangs
            low over his dogged dog head.
Even so, a man with a dog's head longs
            to rush snout first into nature
to smell the pine and burnt sugar
            rising from freshly dampened soil.
Sometimes he wanders for hours,
            stuck in a kind of timelessness,
a vacation from time itself, and misses
            important appointments and deadlines.
A man with a dog's head likes to
            curl up at night with his favorite book,
one he has been reading for years now,
            starting afresh each evening before
he falls asleep, finding himself in a snow-
            storm, a world of whiteness,
staring down at his hands with their
            twisted opposable thumbs which
look so foreign, so wrong, and feels
            the floor cracking beneath him
as he slips further and further into
            the coal and ice world that is his life.

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Copyright © 2020 Henry Israeli All rights reserved
from Our Age Of Anxiety
White Pine Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission