(Image: our dogs Clover and Treacle last year)
‘Black Dog Days’
Treacle, just a black dog
With some white.
Treacle, that sticky place,
But also sickly sweet.
~
Dog, Treacle, can sniff the air
By Clover’s grave,
Under the willow trees
And walk on by.
~
Take her leave, her new
Single dog life,
In her doggy stride
And carry on her way.
~
But us? We can get stuck
In the mire, the thick
Sweet black stuff
Pulling at our mortal boots,
~
Threatening to pull
Us down, drown us stickily,
Fill our lungs with peaty water
As if we were ancient buried bog people.
~
Some humans, artists
Of great renown,
Have taken grief’s, Death’s
Treacle stickiness
~
And stuck with it:
Rothko’s great black on black,
The Houston Chapel
Majestic paintings of Death,
~
Heironymous Bosch,
His delectation of detailed
Gruesomeness, guttural
Painstaking and literal.
~
Frida Kahlo frequently
Painted the broken cage,
Her own fractured body
Garlanded with flowers.
~
And then, and then,
There’s the ‘Hair of the dog’.
To drink again,
To relieve the pain.
~
Perhaps, I ponder
And breathe the thought
That what we ought to,
As humans, do,
~
Perhaps we need
First, to stick, to stay
In the sticky, treacle bog
We have to try,
~
Before we sniff the air
And walk on by
We have to breathe
The peaty water,
~
And drown a while
And die our own tiny deaths.
Perhaps we also need
To drink and drink and drink
~
Again and again and again
And paint the painful pain
In black dog days
Before we can start again.
~~~
I wish to say something about this extraordinary writing, Liz, that reaches so profoundly into the kinds of pain that afflict us in this world. But I can't find the words to say more than that.