Dog Woman's Lullaby

There is a horizontal line in every life where the brown goes dark and what was standing goes to ground.

I used to sleep upright, face to the wall, pillow squared, mouth shut, a good woman in a clean dress.

Then the man died. Then the season turned. Then I found what the dog knows: the floor is honest and the floor is where the living happens.

Down here the world comes in through the hands. Down here the throat opens without permission. Down here a howl is not a cry for help but a signal to the moon that I am still in the building.

I am still in the building.

My mother gave me a soul by missing me before I arrived. She said: you are there because I feel the shape of you. I carry that shape in my chest like a radio tuned to a station between Prague and New York, and the crackle is not static, it is the sound of the universe trying to reach a woman who has gone to ground.

I went to ground.

The books will be there on the shelves when I am done with the floor. They are separate beings, born wet, touched, coddled, alive in spite of everything. They do not need me to stand. They are the radiance and the heights and I am the mud, and the mud is where the power is.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder: where are they going - the flash of a hand, the rustle of pebbles, the woman who crouched and barked at the ceiling of her own kitchen and was not ashamed?

To be bestial is good. To go low is to see what the tall missed. The exit is always open. That is my dream.

But I stay on the floor a little longer, listening to the dial between stations, the place where the dead are because someone is missing them, the place where the signal comes through distorted, human, mine.