Grief is a circuitous fact. I know because I experienced it sharply a half-life ago and here I am in a ripple of it again, similar, but different, but similar. My little dog died. It was sudden and senseless. She was my fast friend. I got the ashes back on Sunday and walked them home under the full moon. The moon drove me mad that night. I couldn’t go to sleep. Around the time it eclipsed my mouth warped open and wouldn’t shut. I’ve never cried like that before, like my jaw was being pried open at a new angle. Not even when my dad died on the front lawn.

Circuitous, because there are so many places where it enters and exits. I’ve abandoned hundreds and hundreds of words attempting to string together all of the patterns and the math. Time’s abacus: days on earth, days underground. Age I am, age I was. Age he was, age he would be. Day I got her, day she died. On and on, maintaining various equilibriums. How frustrating that I have no way of telling it like a clean line, without showing my entire hand and then some. After you feel it once it muddles itself into everything. Death and sex. Anger and sadness. Ego and shame. Joy flecked with pain and sorrow edged with guttural laughter. Love and fear — love and fear. And you don't want to feel better if the alternative is to forget.

I thought about naming her Crescent Moon. Her mouth was this wispy white crescent on a black snout. The look on her face said, I’m the cute boss. A day or two before she died I looked over at and saw her eyes glowing in this uncanny way. She really looked like she was smiling from within.

When my father died I lost broad swaths of my vocabulary. Words dissolved as I scanned the world in front of me, searching for meaning like a sniper. Life presented itself as a series of scenes unfurling in vacillating perspectives, in turns a waterlogged, dreamlike float or a whittled, aerodynamic focus. Hyperreal or surreal. Never level.

I was sixteen then. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of words that, again, were uncontainable and went nowhere. Significance attached itself to even the fleeting-est of moments. All of a sudden the only scale I had to measure with was life and death. And I believed that this tragic loss was evidence of some deep internal badness that I alone possessed.

That was sixteen years ago. (The abacus.) This time, I am shocked to find myself inching around the idea that life and death are indeed random and nonsensical. But if there is no grand significance, then what am I to do with all of these glittering scenes and omens and replications? Where does the procession of black and white dogs and bald backs of heads in the drivers seat start and end? How am I supposed to explain myself?

When the moon kept me up I just read this poem over and over again.

Mary Ruefle painting the abstract with a sure hand. Each time I read it it runs a bit further away from me. But the bunny stays in the same spot, his tiny nose mouthing intently at the cartoon gravestone.

There are some frames that are indelible, that will never leave. The kid who ran and saved her from the street, holding her so gently, as delicately as I would, as she lay limp in his arms, staring out with those big knowing eyes. My mother and my brother and I swallowed up in the interior of a town car on the way to the cemetery, a black leather void in the middle of late summer. Wailing so loudly that it sounds the same as silence. So I must have cried like that, after all.

I have begun to see a new frame, too, just as clear as a memory: my father rendered in charcoal outline against a cold day’s clouds, lounging with one leg hooked on his knee as he reads the news, his chin turned down in concentration, index finger resting on his bottom lip. Then Skunk, and her fuzzy black triangle of a head, nodding with that little nod she does, first apprehensive, then settling in beside him, her front paws stuck out in parallel and her tail wagging expectantly for the moment he looks down and sees her there, when they acknowledge each other with an eternal smile.

P.S. I’m taking a break from Delighter for a while, but I’ll be back. Have a great summer. Read lots of poems and pet lots of dogs.