This here bow tie is the one I learned to tie on, after carrying it around for years, when my colleague here at MR showed me how, one day almost five years ago. So it's my back-to-basics tie.
This morning's dog report is that she's still with us, perkier, possibly having a side complication that isn't life-threatening, not ready to eat, and a good dog. (Okay they didn't say that last part but it's true.) I'm supposed to get a call later today with the latest, and the results of the most recent bloodwork. I've been telling people out loud (not only things they probably aren't nearly as interested in as I am about the miraculous liver and its tricks but also) how superstitious I am about daring to think she might get better because some part of me really things that very act of hoping or letting in the idea that it may all be okay will in fact CAUSE the dog to decline. I'm telling people because I need to hear it in the light of day and openness of sentences and articulated ideas in the attention and witness of my fellows in order to persuade myself, temporarily, that it really isn't true.
Go on and bring it out into the sun, sister Lisa. Yank it from the suction of the muck, like in that Adrienne Rich poem*, and hand-over-hand it up here, into the air. It's not to make it go away, per se. It all deserves its glint of recognition.
*from the Twenty-One Love Poems:
IX
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us ---
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key.... Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I’m waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.
