Beggar Dog

She belongs to a city of mud
and shit caked on walls separated
by brown bodies colliding, doggedly progressing
on feet bare or sandaled squishing through shit and mud.
She follows the food carts
to the wide hard ground where
the people walking part to let pass
a single laden elephant and close
back into an unyieldingly flowing body. It is better
to walk where there is straw to cover the pavement.
She slouches in a corner of boothshade:
head down over paws crossed,
ears and nose fixed on the woman
plump and purplegowned who bends
to tall kettles over fire and prods
at neat piles of food on the low flat
stove. As she takes from the nearest pot a spoon
the bitch pulls herself
on her belly toward the heat, the long
low growl in her throat rising
in pitch to a pleading whine. A stamp
sharp of the woman’s hardsoled foot throws at the dog
a cloud of fine dirt. She retreats
only by curling round to vigorously and noisily clean
her face, then springs ears forward
and attentive, stretching
one paw out at the woman who has not yet returned to her cooking.
The dog sleeps each night
in the empty stall. The woman
to the ragged supplicant at her feet sweetly murmurs:
Viddhi,
Thendi Naaye. (1)
Her sons when she chases them into the dust shout:
Theetum thinne jeevikenne naaye! (2)
The days are for running behind
shrill gangs of birds from perch
to perch, for dodging dirtclumps
and stones thrown by old men, for fleeing
packs of clamoring boys, for eating
fatscented clay and breaking bones
that even when given away taste
as sweet as if stolen.
He was broad and sturdy and though
his coat was uneven and mud
clung to the tips of the mats he
was always on the trail of something
good and always first
to bite into the prize. She is drawn to remain
at the margins of his existence
to absorb his smell with awe and disgust.
The dry air is rank and heavy with putrid fecundity.
Now the woman and her raging boys are gone
from the market. The vendors kick
her and chase her away. She lurks
near backchannel docks and avoids the workers
who load and unload the barges. The drunkards
do not bother her. Each day
she seeks a place to hide, to scratch
in soft cool mud a bed, to wait. In a den
of clay behind a storage yard, beneath a fragment
of fractured vessel in a scrap pile, she keeps
her croaking brood. Their straining throats cry
for food and they drain her, tongue
swollen dry she hunches her back against
the splattering rain. Lifted
awake one midnight already swimming
she reaches high ground alone
and huddles shivering. Finally she rises
to wander at last into a storehouse
during the workers’ mealtime,
coming to stay a short while.
In the crateshadow she flattens herself,
wary, wisely fighting
impatience. But hunger, something
in earnest, allows from her throat
a menacing if quiet whine
of defiance and a routine tasting of
the air with parched tongue. Now no thought
of good things that are gone, the unwanted
is exfoliated: a process not painless
only continuous and unavoidable.
They found her at dawn and threw her
back into her mud for the other
scavengers.

(1) fool, beggar dog
(2) shit eating dog

Bump.

1. Beggar Dog
2. Sunfish