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TOC
		2 poems		contents
		by Gale Acuff
				7
		Twelve
		My dog farts. Sometimes we're at the table having dinner and he's under there and I slip him a little something--he'll eat his supper after ours, with table-scraps, pieces of meat, say. He can't help himself and lets one rip. Is that fool dog down there again, my father says, every evening, it seems. I'm not supposed to laugh but I do. I can't get away with gas myself but he's just a dog and can do dog-things and not even be sent outside for them, whether it's farting or chewing the chair -leg or swiping food off the counter or howling with the siren when some cop-show is on. Man, it's mournful--he's lying there on his stomach, like I am, and the good guys are after the bad and they cut loose with wailing and he lifts his head from his front legs and answers. Man, his eyes look sad and he isn't even a bloodhound or a basset and you'd think his best friend's died and his long cry is meant to send him to Heaven or follow or tell the world another soul has gone to his reward even if he's just a mutt. Dogs are smart like that, know more about death than most folks. Mine's my best friend. I named him Caesar, who was a great man in Roman times, Father says, and he should know, he sells insurance. I love him, Caesar, I mean. I hold him close to me at night and that's good practice for when I'm a man and get me a wife. I stroke his ears and his nose and his throat and his fat belly and listen to him sigh out his wet nostrils, just like a gal when I'll have one. He never farts in bed --that's my territory. He respects that. But by the time that supper trots around he's just itching to cut the cheese and it can't be too wrong because Father never throws him out, or Mother. But she blushes and looks at Father on the sly and says Poor Caesar, I wonder why he does that, and I say, Great John-God, Woman --because he's a man. And we all howl hard.
		Lift and Drag
		When I come home from school I fly my kites if there's enough wind. In January and February there usually is, more than enough, so much so that the sky seems to snatch the wood and paper and string from my hands. It's as if my kite can't wait to join it. Flying is what it loves and the wind obliges, and when I'm finished, ready to go inside and read comic books or watch scary movies on TV or sift through the encyclopedias and discover new lands I'll never see, it's a battle to separate them. I could wait until dark, when the wind dies down, but I have things to do. So, hand over hand, I reel it in, unwinding its play, until it's close enough for me to grab its bridle. When it's well above the trees it's a temptation to give it free rein, let it run as far as it will, and it will. But the farther it flies the longer it takes to bring the thing to earth again. I'm not the sky--it's not so free with me. Yet the higher it goes the higher I go, too, as if my kite is flying me, and the grass is sky and the clouds are hills and that diamond between the earth and sun isn't wood and paper but really me. And that makes me the thing that I would see high and away, held only by a string invisible with distance, but without which I'd go tumbling if no longer taut, to land somewhere, untethered and homeless, higher than even the highest flying birds or passenger planes or satellites, or meteors or comets or planets or stars or constellations. Galaxies and universes. What lies beyond them? Angels, perhaps, and above them, Jesus, and God over all. I doubt I'll get there accidentally--I'll have to earn it. Still, I'm closer than a lot of people. If Heaven is a place, I've sent out probes almost every afternoon after school, reaching to what reaches down to me, and when they return to earth once more, I look for signs of life--a tear here, a hole there, a hemorrhage in the cross-spar. There's life at the other end of me, at least as friendly, and no less intelligent, but I can't quite understand its language, so what I do is repair the damage with some glue and tape and try again to contact and be contacted. The message may be garbled, but I know a little more each time I bring back me to me: We're curious about you, they mean, and afraid.