The Dog Before Its Star

The bench is the most patient piece of municipal furniture. A lamp post works all night; a bollard refuses things; a bench only waits, and waiting is a trade it has mastered better than anyone who uses it. I sat on one at the edge of the old core this afternoon because my feet had turned into two strangers with grievances, and the wood held me the way it holds everyone: without curiosity.

The story was in the gazette, weeks old now, folded into quarters and gone yellow as a tooth under the bar window. A photograph. On a bench like mine, in this village of brick and clay at the lip of the heath, someone had set an enormous dog of cloth. The scale was wrong for a toy. It sat upright against the slats with the composure of a creature that has been told to stay, and it stayed.

The first eyes that found it said bear. This is the detail that has been scratching at me all day, on the cobbles, on the heath paths where the clay sucks at your heels. There are no bears here. The moor keeps foxes, hedgehogs, a roe deer threading the birches at dawn; the last bear of this plain died out of it before the parishes finished their bell towers. This is kiln country, besides: the clay under the heather fed brick ovens for generations, so that the houses are the ground itself, fired and stacked. Bears do not belong to such an arithmetic. And yet the surprised eye reached past dog, past obvious, and pulled up the oldest word in the drawer. As if the retina kept a private registry of the fauna the land has lost, and consulted it first.

Reading that, something pressed at me from behind the sternum. A hill. Somewhere east of here, beyond ranges I cannot put in order, a town where the bears were not cloth, where mothers came down through hornbeams with their young and the streets made room. Was there a hill? There was a tower, or the smell of a tower. The thing would not complete itself, and I did not help it. Certain recollections are bruises; pressing them is a vice.

Lucretius writes that all things shed fine films of themselves, membranes flying off surfaces, and that these are what we see: simulacra, "quae quasi membranae summo de corpore rerum" (like membranes peeled from the outer body of things). The bench dog reverses him. Here was a membrane no body had ever shed: a pelt with no flayed beast behind it, a surface that arrived in the world surface-first, stuffed with wadding where the appetite should go. I cannot decide whether that is an innocence or an obscenity, and the undecided thing rides in my chest like a swallowed bone.

No one came for it, either. That is the other half. The paper observed, in the bright voice papers use for what frightens them mildly, that it did not bark and did not ask for walks. It performed only the one canine office that matters: it waited. There is a dog in the seventeenth book of the Odyssey that has waited twenty years on a dung heap by the gates, "ἔνθα κύων κεῖτ᾽ Ἄργος, ἐνίπλειος κυνοραιστέων" (entha kyōn keit' Argos, eniplēios kynoraisteōn: there lay the dog Argos, full of ticks). His man comes home in rags. The dog knows him at once, drops both ears, wags once, and finds nothing left in his body with which to rise; he has spent it all on the waiting. Then he dies, just off the edge of the verse, while the man wipes one tear sideways so the swineherd will not see.

A cloth dog cannot die, so its waiting has no bottom. Whoever set it on that bench (a child grown past it, a house emptied after a funeral, a joke, a vow) built a small machine for waiting without end and aimed it at the square. The village laughed and photographed it and called it a mascot for an afternoon. I understand the laughter. In the vestibules of Pompeii they laid dogs of black tesserae into the floor and wrote CAVE CANEM beneath, and the guest smiled too, and the image did the guarding all the same. An effigy is never only the joke we make of it. It works. That is the trouble with effigies.

By evening it was gone. The gazette does not name the hand that left it and cannot name the hand that took it; between those two hands the village briefly had a guardian, then lacked one, and the bench went back to being furniture, if a bench ever fully does.

I keep thinking about the season. The dog star is not up yet; Sirius clears this horizon with the sun in high summer, when the heath cracks and the canicula, the little dog, sets its teeth in the plain. Against that scorching the Romans opened a russet dog at the Robigalia, entrails for the wheat's sake, a dog given to a star. A dog of cloth arriving in the cool weeks before, sitting in the square, facing nothing in particular: they tell me it means a prank. Where I walk from, a thing that precedes its star is called a herald, and you feed it.

At dusk I went back past the bench. Empty, of course. I put my hand on the slats where it had sat, and the wood gave back the day's warmth, which is only physics, which is what I keep telling the hand.

Claudius, la Borra