Where Was I ?

Yeah. Events have run over me and kept on going...so where was I before the dog died?
Talking about this trailer I'm in :
It's a "Hunter" from the forties or fifties. Years ago, it was parked down near Long Point among the squatter shacks on the strip of land between the railroad track and and the water.

Eventually they built an addition onto the trailer ; and later on, while they were building an even larger addition onto the first addition, they gave the old trailer away to a passing hippy couple in a pick-up truck.
These kids towed the trailer up into the woods in back of a local farm where they already had a little off - grid homestead, and there they attached new aluminum cladding , built authentic looking doors, and put a skylight over the trailer galley..... but then they only used it to store craft materials, , while they continued living in their little house .
Sun, rain, snow...... many moons and years blew by...... the couple split, mice moved into the trailer, the roof began to fail, and the skylight to leak..

Around then, Brother Davey was in exile from Ithaca, and in ruin from his Bed and spectacular Edgewood Place Bed and Breakfast forclosure, Had stuffed himself and his too much of his stuff into Little Nose Johnson's small traveler trailer here on his daughter's property. She has a soft spot for terailers and for him, so she let him haul the old Hunter out of the woods and set it up behind her little house on the hill.
He tried,to stop the skylight from leaking, but couldn't, so he built a cupola right over the skylight. He wanted it to be big enough so he could at least sit up there....so that's how high he made the walls.
But with the arched plexiglass roof over that, an average size adult can stand up in the center of it....and from the road, it looks like two trailers mating . It is nice up here at night though. When I was a kid, I thought the sky was a plastic dome; up here, it more or less is.

In the rear end of the trailer, Davey also built a bath-tub/bed combination....lid down it's a bed, lid up a tub. I have to give him credit for the tub bed. it suits me just fine. I always liked tubs for sleeping, and it's good to have the wet/dry option..
Then......like I said back a ways..... after he lived in the place for about a year , and, when his daughter and family moved out of the main house, he moved across the yard, leaving the trailer once again to insurgent mice and the weasels.

And now, after living for a year the Ark I made, then getting crowded out by rescue hens and living in the chicken house for a few months..... I find myself in the trailer.
But I didn't move myself in. I was moved in while unconscious.

The last thing I remembered., I'd been scything out in the orchard .

And then I was surfacing in the beforementioned bath tub which had been unused and empty of everything but mouse and weasel turds for several years.

My head was so heavy I could hardly lift it out of the water,
I looked up through the bath fog, not at clouds racing past the sun or moon, but at the blond birch paneling and a smoke detector with its mouth hanging open.

I gradually recognized where I was, but had no idea how I got there ......and who it was that I heard grinding coffee and the airy whistling on the other side of the sliding door.

And no, I didn't recognize her as she came through with the coffee.... what with the oak leaf tattooed on her cheek and blue ink maple leaves streaming down her arms .....
She knelt down by the tub and waved her chipped, maroon fingernail in front of my eyes. . Beyond the tattoos, that skin mostly big , pale freckles like shadows of floating leaves on the bottom of a stream. And that pumpkin - chanterelle hair..
She helped me sit up in the tub and she held the coffee mug to my lips.
A raft of fuzzy stuff floated on the coffee.
Rafts of the fuzzy berries in the bathtub too, Sumac berries. And the bath water was slightly pink, as if I had bled some. Maybe I had.
If I could have lifted one hand to feel my head, I would t have found the sharp lump there, but me and my hands were not yet communicating.
Then she says: You'n me........... born to be free."
That crazy rhyming habit. Makes her speech so halting, it drives me nuts.
I didn't smell he raw garlic she used to chew like gum to keep human predators off....but It had to be her, my poetry girl. I couldn't move, or hardly speak, but already I wanted to hug her and to wring her freakin frecklly neck.

Love on the Roof

It wasn't generally known around the English department that I lived under a desk up in the junior faculty office garret , but only the most abstracted prof wouldn't notice me - barely four feet tall without my prosthetics - as I shuffled around Goldwyn Smith Hall, sat in on writing workshops, or appeared among the plaster casts of broken statuary at the Temple of Zeus open readings.
When I stood on a chair that first time to recite "Tripod, the Three Legged Dog" , people bent lower and fished in their coffee cups, but at the first line - " I'm going to hump your leg "- Archie Ammons let out a big country guffaw, and immediately the place echoed with laughter which resurged each of the three times in the poem's six lines that I threatened to hump their leg. It was a lame poem, but a few months later, crudely revised and worse yet, it would make me so infamous I would decide to disappear.


After that first reading, there were those who called me Tripod and made the obvious third-leg jokes, but Tripod was a real dog, truly famous on campus in the fifties, and long forgotten before most of them had appeared there. He was a malamute -half wolf- sled dog who had lost a front leg to gangrene as a result of a fight injury. He was useless as a sled dog after that, so some student had brought him back from a trip to Alaska, but it was not all that hard for Tripod to become top dog on the soft-dog Cornell campus.
At that time Cornell was an institution where it was a matter of pride and unofficial policy that any dog could attend any class. Dogs walked to campus with their fraternity boys, stayed and strayed all day, and hardly created more than a ripple of chuckling when they flopped down beside the lecturn or mated in the back of the lecture hall.
The beginning of the end of the dog years came when Tripod killed a couple of other dogs and was deported back to Alaska , but still in the early seventies when I was living in the desk , If anyone had suggested that you should not let your dog outside unless you were attached to it by a leash and that you should pick up its turds with a plastic baggy, that someone would have said, "pick up turds with a plastic baggy? What's a plastic baggy? What do you want with dog turds?

I wandered with a frisbie and Pike's dogs during the day, and I became a regular at old Professor Cole's introductory Geology lecture class they called "Rocks for Jocks." I liked the big story of the geological landscape, and the ecstatic phrases that rolled through it, like " glacial erratic boulders" .
I wrote it down in my tablet and drew pictures of glacial erratic boulders on page after page , some the size of houses and with pine trees growing on the top.
A slight girl with pumpkin colored hair was sitting two seats from me and because of her powerful aura of garlic, everyone else was at least three seats from her. I had also noticed her at the Zeus readings, and around about when I was throwing the frisbie for the dogs . I always sat fairly close to her in the Rocks lectures because there was always plenty of room around her ...anyway I have always been a dog for strong smells, so we were alone frequently in our private garlic bubble.
She wasn't more than five feet tall, with that pumpkin hair and big freckles mostly covering her pale skin like leaves on water. She was thin and superficially ethereal.... except for the heavy smell of garlic. She ate it by the whole clove from a Cracker Jack Box.
Her eyes were so pale green or gray that it was hard to see where they were directed, but she had obviously been watching me and my doodling .
One day before old Professor Cole had finished shuffling the notes that he never looked at because he had been giving the same scintillating lecture for years, the garlic girl, who had sat down only one seat away from me that day, tore this poem out of her notebook and pushed it onto the writing arm of my chair:

" That Glacial Erratic is nothing ecstatic,
or a god-egg that fell from the sky.
But it's not so mundane as if it fell from a train:
a garden stone imported from Shanghai.
Its purely symptomatic of ice in the Arctic
Which built up in the Great Bye and Bye."

It was very cute , but all I could say was thanks.
She offered a grin and a garlic clove from her cracker jack box. I put it in my shirt pocket instead of eating it right there, and that is all that passed between us until the class was over, but the deal was done, and after class, we walked out in our private bubble of garlic mist.

The garlic, she would tell me, was to keep predators off, and Garlic was the name she went by. She never told me her real name, but she said her father was an ornithologist, a specialist in raptors. I never heard about her mother. Garlic said she could see that I was no predator. This was true....a scavenger , but not much of a predator, certainly not a sexual one, and at that point, I was a twenty-some year old virgin who had never humped anything but trees. Garlic took me down to a place in the gorge where she kissed me and told me that I was an elf or a fairy.....in the magical sense......we took garlic together and she came with me to my desk lair. We pulled out all the drawers to make more space and that evening she discovered my General Dinglehammer - she was the one who came up with that name for it.
From then on Garlic sat with me in Zeus, called me Pan the Man and Boneypart in public, was with me privately every night, insisted on climbing with me on the rope rigging through the skylight to the G.S. roof where, ecstatic, we rang the dingle bells in the copper valley , held on and came through it , even as we slid half way to the eves and scared the shit out of me.

That outrageous behavior didn't have consequences or get noticed, but we were becoming conspicuous. Davey said I should stop bringing Garlic to the office...maybe some envy involved. I doubt any girl ever told him he was a magical being. Anyway, I think some of the other junior faculty up there were beginning to sniff around and talk. Global forces were at work. Erratic love had to go.