Whiting Award Winners

The dog is God.

It knows it is God.

It is God living with God.

Even in the rain,

the esters, the pheromones,

calligraphy of the sacred,

the great head points into the wind,

the blood thrashes in the thick veins.

The language of the feces, urine,

species, rut, offal, decay –

nothing is hidden from the dog,

who keeps its own counsel,

leading you by the leash.

There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

        broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

        By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

        And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

       And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

That night my daddy came in my room and sat the edge of my bed with his back to me, his long-john shirt whitening a space in the dark. He told me that had been no man at all, but a ghost, a Confederate soldier, and I stiffened in my iron bed. Here was thick with ghosts, he told me, and told me not to be afraid, but I was, that the first one I ever saw and me maybe four years old. After he left I cried with the blanket up over my head, listening for those ghost boots slapping up the stairs.

The deaf hear only in their dreams. I am sure

I can hear nothing. My how the mountain leaps

towards the sea and the little village below.

Who sang for the white plate my father tossed

at my sister’s shadow? What funeral is held

for a broken compass? When cutting onions,

leave a candle lit somewhere near an old man

holding his wife in a napkin. In the torn light of evening,

there is enough treason for everybody. Excuse me,

I should say something about the beauty of cranes.

Once in a sycamore I tossed a brick at a boy’s head.

It opened like the sea. I think I saw a crane.

KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying
 
TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude. 
 
KEVIN
What
 
TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy. 
 
KEVIN
A pale what
 
TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.
 

Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We

were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,

thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was

Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth

an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or

was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets

together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,

such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow

from a shinbone.