Poems by CJ Sage
(with permission of Eileen Myles)
By CJ Sage
What is lost has more power than what is saved.
To be a well of sadness is a very real thing.
This is what it is to be a dog. Weather and feeling
and knowing. I was alone so much in the beginning.
I was so scared. I heard the telephone ring.
It was on the floor and I’m small, I’m wee,
and I pushed the receiver off the cradle with my nose.
I recognized Tom on the other side. He knew it was me.
I said errroorahrah rah. Rah. I said erooo. I meant help me.
I could hear him laughing. I said erroo, I’m not kidding.
He didn’t know what to say.
I see you pacing, trying to figure out if you love enough.
A dreaming dog cries.
When you see a dog doing that paddling and the woowoo
people say look she’s dreaming, she’s hunting.
No she is fleeing the mass extermination of dogs.
A woman cries in her winged back chair and her puppy walks up
and says Mommy I’m here. The woman sobs even harder.
Has any dog’s death been honored this way before.
I feel like a funeral director. I want to go home.
If every cell in your body had a vote, you would be in the minority.
How hard it would be to be a movie star. To be applauded
and owned. Isn’t that like being a very good dog.
“Separation,
or Some Lives are Like Hot Air Balloons Locked Indoors”
By CJ Sage
These days are everyone’s run over and over
by cattle trucks or parties of drunken speed boats.
These days, pain is seeking refuge in the local forest
and finding a bus-sized pile of slaughtered bucks.
Pain is the ten holes in your heart, the twenty in each lung,
the everything spinning—as usual.
Or pain is no longer feeling any surprise.
Here and there the dogs in third world cities keep running
ovals by the thousands. Idealists, you and I, keep standing
lonely on blind corners bombarded with our signage,
never less shocked by the masses shot and shooting,
driving through.
*
There’s a house with a barred entry
door.
There’s a woman walking through,
holding the bars behind her
so the door can’t hurry her with a shove.
Does she hallucinate a mass of balloons
there, bouncing on the indoor air?
She was expecting a houseful of dogs
—where are the dogs? They are there.
Once, my love came home from
the Canarias
with a lithe orange life following on her string.
Her ears were jackrabbit, and her feet as well.
Whenever he stepped away, she blew full panic.
Have you ever seen a dog snap herself
through the air to slap & slap, & slap again,
a wall with the ribs of her wild orange body?
There is the bounce of dogs at play or in Hello.
There is the bounce of dogs predicting
what they know.
For some who’ve lost a slab of their lives,
the next loss, every disappearance
however small, is like the forever goodbye
of a one-way flight over the Atlantic
howled through the walls of a crate
stuffed into the dark, freezing belly of a plane.
“Canidae Familiaris”
By CJ Sage
Feral
I miss the wild. Divergent,
no one touched me there.
No rescuers or playdates,
no cameras.
When I roamed too close,
people threw their rocks
or pelted me with stale bread.
Shade trees just stood there,
unrelatable. Birds avoided me.
So chittery.
Now I’m sound sensitive
and light sensitive too.
Windstorms and predatory
day to hide from.
People think I’m stupid,
but I know who they are.
They will never be like me.
Feralized
Most of us are not born into this life.
Some arrive antithetically,
in rusted, bar-bottomed boxes.
Some from box to wilderness.
Few escape, but those who do
avoid the gentrify, the shock
of relocation, the choke of air
in a gated space, the ever-changing,
incomprehensible rules.
Or the gasps of breath,
alone in a locked car
where strangers notice through a window
—a few furrowing their brows—
where our wide eyes make us look
almost human.
Noticing is another thing we have
uncomfortably in common.
It’s the self-reflectiveness
that makes things awkward.
Formerly Feral
Under-roof I have arrived.
Like a tree pinched from canopy
planted in the foyer of a carpenter’s home,
I sustain repurpose.
My tissues alter and my ways
become slow.
I am no rescue. I am remodeled.
Who is saved from freedom?
I am just transformed.
They say formerly. The truth
is more conversion.
My safe place and theirs are different
therapies though I accept their signalment.
When I can, I will be good, for they seek it.
Makers: I come from vast wilderness.
When I forget, inheritance returns,
that creeping usher.
Makers: You bow to heredity as well.
We are in the arms of abdication.
We are thick in the tongue and torso.
Now sleep is a grantor of asylum.
Sheltered
They decided to round us up.
In nature, mongrels like us rarely get closer
than when held in the geometries
of a partitioned metal truck,
where group prayer, of a sort, begins.
Eventually we are delivered
to algebraic crowds in concrete burrows.
Certain would-be converts howl desolation
day and night. The attendants bark too.
Legend says in other worlds our kind is free;
they roam the land as they please;
they keep themselves.
Fairytales say in this world our kind is defended
– safe in the houses and apartments.
Some solitary – for their safety.
Fables say the fortressed renounce original thought.
I
don’t know.
Everyone seems distracted and confused.
The guards grunt what’s best
and set our deadlines for us.
Our brains are not the same.
We speak very different languages.
We have a few weeks to become fluent.
After that, they’ll walk us to the back door,
save some broken handovers instead.
Isn’t there a human saying?
The winners make the rules;
the losers live by them?
If we could, we’d say
we tried our very best.
- CJ
Sage’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Barrow Street,
Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Clade Song, Conduit, Crazyhorse (now Swamp
Pink), The Journal, The Literary Review, North American Review, Orion,
Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Threepenny Review. Books include Open
House and The San Simeon Zebras.