by Charles S. Kraszewski.
Se vedea fiammeggiar fra gli altri arnesi
scudo di lucidissimo diamante,
grande che può coprir genti è paese
quante ve n’ha fra il Caucaso e l’Atlante.
I thought our dog – all 150 pounds of him –
had rushed the bed with a shoulder bred
to keep legionary beeves in line
up the chalky lanes of Helvetia,
but when the fog horns honked out over the bay,
and the Arab down the hall
began to ululate in panic
I got up and peered out into the porpoise-grey predawn.
They were to say it was a 4.0
epicentered in El Cerrito or East Richmond Heights,
with taproot stretching down five miles or so.
There’s something called the Hayward Fault.
But they’re all wrong. It know it’s all my fault.
I saw him, with his back against Coit Tower,
the late moon glistening off his golden galea,
his redwood-long primaries listlessly shrouding
eucalyptus and lemon bottlebrush
on both sides of the hill.
(Even slouched on his melancholic butt
The tower reached but halfway up his spine).
It was my guardian angel
as Dürer might have sketched him after reading Tasso,
the tip of his spear soaring past his right shoulder
(the highest point, for now, west of the Rockies).
When he sighed, it rolled against his collarbone
(disorienting the pilot of a Korean jumbo jet
Not again, not again! he hissed,
lifting uri-mal vocables through his polished teeth).
Far below, along the looping, deserted drive
seven devils yapped and snarled in mocking glee
around my angel’s sandalled foot (Kearney St. side);
each one a bichon frise (that figures),
each one with a bone-shaped tag hung from its collar,
each tag sporting my name, and my address.
So, annoyed at last, he’d stomped his right foot
at 5:33 AM,
and again at 5:41
at which they ran off, spraying malodorous urea
along the curbs leading back to Mason St.
He glanced my way only once, only to frown
and gaze back out toward the clean element of the sea,
and not even the innocent pup-faced bats
that gamely flitted round his ivory brows
in sympathetic, crazy, chuckling loops
could cheer him up.