Dog-park –
A car door closes with the sound of failed fireworks, but loud enough to draw my glance its way, to where a window blurs the image of a back-seated dog, panting, its owner's lips twisted in a frown, grim-faced. In a gasp of emissions, they're gone, but it's then that my trailing eyes notice someone still trying.
Everywhere, at any time of the day, somewhere in the world, someone is still trying. Trying all sorts of things. Trying to make things work. Repeating and repeating formulas, solutions, approaches. One way now, another way, next, but always trying.
There, right now, is another person trying. I watch how they hold a tangle of cords like they were carriage reins, how they raise them slowly, like a fisherman uncertain of their catch, trying to understand, holding them at arm's length from the place where they stand beside heavy, canvas, hammock folds, limp and swollen as a peapod ready for harvest. Suddenly, a sound trills above the park. Yes, it is happy, but, no, it's not music. It's an unseeen child, I believe, whose peals of unrestrained glee are rising from deep within the hammock, in teasing delight.
And I hear that laughter over here, inside this car, where now, I also see two dogs and, oh, now, a third, galloping, their canine jaws agape, racing along the dog park's worn, bone-like paths, their pacing sounds silenced by distance, until the moment -- I know it occurs but cannot see it---when the soft padding of fingers of those humans I overlooked, pull back the collar latch on three separate leashes. Their clicking sounds, too hushed for my ears, are released. The dogs take off driven by their ancestral search for scent, for freedom, for the chase. Each animal breaks, cantors, then morphs into a muscle-driven gallop, rising momentarily in a leap, challenging the temporality of freedom.
A car door closes with the sound of failed fireworks, but loud enough to draw my glance its way, to where a window blurs the image of a back-seated dog, panting, its owner's lips twisted in a frown, grim-faced. In a gasp of emissions, they're gone, but it's then that my trailing eyes notice someone still trying.
Everywhere, at any time of the day, somewhere in the world, someone is still trying. Trying all sorts of things. Trying to make things work. Repeating and repeating formulas, solutions, approaches. One way now, another way, next, but always trying.
There, right now, is another person trying. I watch how they hold a tangle of cords like they were carriage reins, how they raise them slowly, like a fisherman uncertain of their catch, trying to understand, holding them at arm's length from the place where they stand beside heavy, canvas, hammock folds, limp and swollen as a peapod ready for harvest. Suddenly, a sound trills above the park. Yes, it is happy, but, no, it's not music. It's an unseeen child, I believe, whose peals of unrestrained glee are rising from deep within the hammock, in teasing delight.
And I hear that laughter over here, inside this car, where now, I also see two dogs and, oh, now, a third, galloping, their canine jaws agape, racing along the dog park's worn, bone-like paths, their pacing sounds silenced by distance, until the moment -- I know it occurs but cannot see it---when the soft padding of fingers of those humans I overlooked, pull back the collar latch on three separate leashes. Their clicking sounds, too hushed for my ears, are released. The dogs take off driven by their ancestral search for scent, for freedom, for the chase. Each animal breaks, cantors, then morphs into a muscle-driven gallop, rising momentarily in a leap, challenging the temporality of freedom.
