Black Dog Days

(Sticky Grief)

(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.

~~~