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When the night's moon is a quarter
She stands in breast deep water
The skylight beams on her wish
If comes her way a catch of fish.

She's the robust woman of night
And it's no fancy's flight
She gritfully spreads her net
Even when the river is in spate.

She knows well when the tides swell
The games are not easy to catch
Where the river meanders to a curve
She waits low tide holding her nerve.

When the silvery streaks struggle for breath
She looks not real but a myth
A mud princess with a golden heart
An apparition seen but can't be touched.

On a river with eons of length
She struggles with all her strength
I won't ever get even a chance
She's too focussed to give me a glance.
I come to the creek path near my house, the one my wife doesn’t like me to walk alone, for fear I might fall.

I see mountain bikes riding through, a leashed  triplets of dogs of Goldilock sizes their caregiver behind, struggling to contain their strides.

My husky-chi barks at them, underneath a low growl  in the back of  his throat threatens to come out.  

He pulls me to the path. I pull him back.  

The evening concert of cicadas and toads in the overgrown retention pond between is just starting its clicks and croaks.  


Hours  later, on my beast’s last brief walk of the night, while most life is asleep and the path is still dangerous, I hear their deafening crescendo.

The creek is a gray smear cutting through the golden moon, the canopies of the night.  


Only the streetlights, the head lamps of a car turning the corner, show me the way home— but I think, know, only want the path.

A chill rolls in, so to the first drops of  predicted rain, of  the morning  fog and mist to come.

I unleash my dog and he vanishes into the path.  I hear the splash of water, the snap of twigs and crunch of leaves that lets me know he had crossed to the other side.  

There’s a small squeal, two long beats, and with it, the concert stops, then restarts in a softer refrain.  

My  beast proudly returns, dropping a field mouse at my feet.  I am disgusted, but being gracious, I pat my dog’s brindle head, tell him he’s a good boy. This is his nature and I am helpless to restrain it.

I stuff the creature into a dog waste bag, think of walking to the path, just to where the concrete and forest separate, and pitching it as far as I can, but then realize my dog would just retrieve it again.          

My dog snuggles against my leg. I put the mouse in my pocket, pet my dog’s heaving stomach.  

The path calls him- calls me. I clip the leash to his harness, prepare for him to tug me onto the path.  

Instead, he spins around without a snarl,  and starts to follow the scent trail of home, pulling until the leash tells him that I want to say.

I sit down at the end of the concrete path, my dog obeying my motion, but facing home. My fingers create a lazy trail in the muddy earth.  

When it’s deep enough for a small grave, I drop the mouse in, covering the hole over quickly before my dog notices the rejected offering— the present I can not keep or even explain to my waiting wife.  

A sadness wells in me- not for the mouse but for steps I will never take- the knowledge that I will fall and never get back home- the knowledge that I will not know the wild path forward, just the hard, white one behind.
  Jul 2024 Pradip Chattopadhyay
Birdie
I don’t believe in heaven
But if I somehow did
I know you’d be there waiting for me
How you were back when you lived
I don’t believe in heaven
But if I went there I would see
Four little furry faces
So happy to see me
I don’t believe in heaven but
Sometimes I wish I could
If you had ever spoken I think
You’d say that I should
Because
The closest I’ve been to heaven
Was being loved by you
The innocent love from pets now lost
Is the truest love it’s true
A Dyad of Love…

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for my friend, Poetoftheway,
whose love stories
chipped this one off the
stoneface of ancien memories..

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The dyad definition is the close relationship of two people over a long period with many interactions in different settings. The most basic requirement for dyad sociology is that there are two members of the group. The dyadic communication definition pertains to how the two group members interact with each other.

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What business is this!

Curmudgeon crusty old man,
go back to bed, it’s early morn,
and you’ve got no business, any more,
writing of trances of love dyads!


the vague recall of the vagaries
of complete surrender to a state
of captivity, a single star of devoted
adoration ‘of the lovers, by the lovers,
for the lovers,’ which ties us up
helpless, forming bonds that crazy
stretch in ways that cannot be but are,
these recollections bare~remembered,
of driving through the night, to capture
one more moment of love~light~night, before life’s
necessity imposed an unthinkable, a
separate conscious that made the
chest groan out loud with alternating
currents of elation and a loss, that
collapses and coalesces and grows
beyond unbearable…

no reason to step back to that dyad,
when the world was defined by sideways
glances that thrilled, oh my god, all
control lost, every sonnet, every song
on the radio was written

exclusively

for your telescopic universe of
microscopic mutual gravity

and you two misspell words with unconscious
rapport, soul and sole used side by side
easy
interchangeably, and no else can perceive
the lack of definition, where the amoeba
bodies merge into a single cell unity…
and seeings  new composition merge, a blending, exact,
the world is comme il faut,  as it must be,
properly…

not yet Seven AM, and you sputter and weep,
teary eyed of memory of seconds of a single days helping,
when you understood the
meaning of peaks, and nothing of valleys,
and the unthinkable did not exist, and the
one next to you sleeps soundly secured by
the knowledge, fervent belief, that you will
be there to welcome her back to life, with smilies
of smiles, fresh coffee, and fingers that soothe
the temples, erasing all that need not be
remembered, not now, not today, and the old
man whimpers with delight at these, his very
own words, that drifted from his consciousness,
unexpectedly, just because he stumbled on
that very old word, dyad, with its multiplicity
of shadings, but! a singular expression,
so all encompassing that he must cease to
compose for his eyes are too blurred to see…
7:13am
Jul Tue 23
two thousand and twenty four
and the great replacement is how I speak with but my

eyes…

and there is a sacrifice of subtlety…and nuance is a sometime thing,
BUT, when I

tilt my head and stilt my neck, and she laughs at my
aggrandizement,

for emphasis,
a periodic two step is most useful when exaggerating…

and the the picture of me grimace grinning, arms akimbo waving,
and the peculiarity of my grunts, well, makes her crackle with laughter,

which is so deep appreciated I further employ my tongue to
make the point  that words are super superfluous and She
reimburses my kissing with a two grasp handed heady head
embrace-taking, which necessitates our eyes in a combine,

and there is no more to say,

for the eyes have it!
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