Mood

I’m at the fraying end of my rope with knowing.
If I could, I’d leave its ravelings to the dogs,
or to what finagles itself into what I read-
facts, strange but true. Even the gray harping
of TV, even this I prefer to being privy. Leave
me alone: don’t tell me stories--their cranky lessons

weigh in me. Don’t misconstrue. Lessons
are what I’ve thrived on, those safe, all-knowing
teachers of what it means to be human--the leavings
of experience: love, hate, loss and loss--dogma
I’ve come to tolerate, despite its harpooning
rhythms. No. What I’m talking about is that red

flag: a wavering when strangers go reading
to me from their hearts, stories piling up like loess--
that gold loam blown to dunes by wind--or like harp
strings stretched for fretting. How I want to say no,
how I can never say no. Why am I this dogged?
Do they recognize in me the marks of leaving,

or do I send sings of willingness? Like leaves
say, that let go in autumn, drift into mounds, ready
reminders of passage ... how they invite big dogs,
the swift kicks and dives of kids whose lessons
go undone because there’s something unknown
in how dead leaves wait. Or, maybe I am a harp,

all 46 strings quiescent, awaiting always a harpist--
how pluckable I am then, for the taking, the leaving.
It’s sitting on a bus, trapped at the window, no wings
to fly me from how a story unfolds in the aisle seat, red-
eyed, the old man says I miss my wife no less on
Tuesday than on Friday--every day---and her dog

comes to me, moping and sad, even her old dog
can’t stand it. My heart splits in two, a harpy
snatching at one side, my old good-Catholic lessons
on compassion holding tight to the other. Leave-
taking isn’t always on option, is it? Waiting on red
lights, a next stop, how the saddest is knowing

the end without knowing the end. If there’s a lesson
here, it’s in the dog’s grief--a love insistent, cleaving
to it’s story, but split from it too, so quick, so sharp.

-Mary Pinard