DOG DAYS FOLIO

The air scratches the space

between what is seen and what is said.

A clearing makes room for slow thinking.

Thought stretches and turns twice before resting.

Signals tremble at each other’s edges

leaping without crossing the room.

A glance sets off on an orbit

across an impossible distance.

Two points pull the invisible thread of a double star –

burning apart, half-hearted together.

Pressure builds, shimmering in the heat.

Every order has its day.

The world of a stare is mute, cut loose from language,

the mirror repeats, but not quite faithfully.

Everything feels close enough to touch,

yet forever divided in standstill –

all the impasses that never break,
all the distances that keep the light alive,

all the breaths that hesitate,

all the pulses that never align

press against the scolding skin.

Dog Days.

Some motion outlives its own reason. A wheel keeps turning long after whatever drove it has left, coasting on nothing but its own weight. At what point does the turning become the story? At what point does the reason get forgotten?

The days that feel endless are already shortening on the calendar. Dog days fall after the solstice, not before it. The calm is a lie the bodies tell themselves about Time. Heat slows everything down. It sharpens everything too: still enough to look asleep, wired ready to bolt.

The a-un pair – komainu, Japanese guardian lion-dogs – stand at the gates of shrines, the very first sound and the very last held on either side of the same threshold. They’re not there to guard against anything coming from outside. They’re there for what already walks through on two legs, carrying its own ways in with it.

Two of them, split across the middle. Weight forward, gold against a ground gone past dusk, scorched, tired. Or one and the same, caught before and after the choice is made. Which is which? Not knowing is anchored to the question.

Whatever’s brewing this arrived with the double light of the old Sirius: two stars, held by a pull neither one made and neither one can undo. The light can’t explain how this started. Only that it hasn’t stopped.

Entropy insists this should be running down by now – the pull weakening, the distance widening, until nothing’s left to hold it dear. It isn’t. Somewhere in there is the human cry countering that: pleading, reasoning, turning the force into a story and stringing together where it’s meant to lead. That argument never lasts long – such is the heat of the dog days. But it casts a shadow long enough for someone else to walk into, and stay there a while, watching another fight get ready to unfold.

In any short while, any fight turns into a shape – the dance of matter, reason’s lost. Maybe the nagging question isn’t when this started, or how. It’s whether stopping was ever actually available to them. Or whether that was always the part being performed for whoever was watching the celestial show.

The star debris makes the same case every August. Same trails, burning on schedule – the Perseids, showering the same patch of sky seen from where we stand – long after whatever shed them has moved on. Whoever’s watching sees something different depending on where they’re standing. Total from here. Barely a shadow two cities over. Nothing at all, far enough away. Even the question of whether it was ever real depends on where you’re standing when you ask it.

Turn around a few times, lie at the foot of your thought. Close the folio. The story’s over. We can’t look at the bright light without hurting the eye. Too much clarity, and we can’t handle it.