we walked home a different way

as the spirit wanes the form appears
- charles bukowski

I TOOK TIGGER to the park. he skittered on the way and shat drizzlingly on other people's nature strips.

he shat drizzlingly and i'd forgotten to bring anything to clean shit up with and while he was drooling shit out of his arse a car pulled up and i thought it was the owner of the land on which he was drooling shit and i felt bad and skulked off with my skittering dog. if i'd been wearing a coat with a collar i would have turned it up but i wasn't so i didn't.

we got to the park and walked. signs told us to keep dogs away from kangaroos. i was surprised. i've never in my life seen a kangaroo in the suburbs.

we walked home a different way. i didn't want to walk past the house of drooling shit again so we walked to the end of a low path by the creek and then scambered and crampled up a steep bank to a railway bridge. once i slid. i slid and grabbed at fennel. the grass separated from the earth but i did not fall. whew.

we got up higher and walked along the tracks and then across them and there was a fox splayed goldenbrown between the tracks, eyes cataracted pale pale blue by death and staring in two different directions at nothing. a little further along was what was left of a snake after something had eaten half of it. the slope was filigreed with fennel. the lowering sun shone through it and embered the paling day with tiny comets: waving on slow green cords like a multitude of tiny kites.

we walked back the next day and fuck me there was a kangaroo, tall and grey and looking at us carefully. i called tigger over. the kangaroo loped off and we followed as polite as we could. we followed it and it loped and was gone. later we climbed mt issues and looked down and it was back: a magical being come to collapse the bound between city and wildness, between this thing over here and that thing over there. the grass felt hallowed thereafter and the shadows of things had been exchanged for magic shadows and everything seemed slightly unfixed on its axis. i was reminded i didn't know the full extent of what was possible.

i wondered what tigger made of the kangaroo. to me the kangaroo looked like an envoy between the human and canine domains: tailed and furred like dogs, largely bipedal and upright like humans when still.

xxxx