Friday, July 15, 2011
"Animal is Spiritual" by Len Anderson
Animal Is Spiritual
she calls out in a loud bark
from her doorstep as she sees me walk her way,
still halfway up the block. It’s Nika,
the German Shepherd
who greets and licks everyone,
her slow, arthritic walk
and coat worn bare
to the black skin of her back, sign
of the sloughing off of the flesh.
I try to understand
what she means by this.
Animal is Spiritual,
she barks again and again, and as I approach
she walks out to the street,
does not look for traffic,
crosses to my side and waits for me.
She nuzzles my pant leg, I pet her and say,
You have a point—
the survival advantage of softened interpersonal boundaries
among kin in social animals could well drive a pleasure response
that might be conditioned by the touch of a hand, the nave of a
church, or a voice howling a hymn to the moon.
She licks my cool hand with her warm tongue.
But surely you would admit,
I go on,
the Animal embraces more
than the Spiritual and the Spiritual may well embrace more
than the Animal.
She looks up at me as if I have lost my mind.
I can read it in her eyes: Animal is Spiritual.
But then, what can I expect of anyone
with the limited symbolic capacity
of a Canis familiaris?
And I am embarrassed
to have even talked with her.
I take her by the collar back to her doormat,
tell her to be a good
spiritual dog and stay on her
side of the street. I go on with my walk.
At the end of the block I turn to see
a truck and a car stop and she
in the middle of the road,
as if she does not care
if she lives or dies. The drivers gesture,
but she pays them no mind. She just looks at me
with those eyes again—I,
another animal, a fifty-eight-year-old biped,
in the middle of the street, yelling,
Oh saint among dogs,
please get out of the road!
I, who still don’t know what
Animal is, what
Spiritual is.
- Len Anderson
