Poetry: An Andalusian Dog –K.T. Landon

AN ANDALUSIAN DOG

Once is enough for Buñuel’s Chien,
because even if you know now it was a dead calf
or a dead pig or a dead donkey,
at the time you thought it was an old, blind dog
and now the truth and the belief exist side by side,
just as your nineteen-year-old self, weeping for that dog,
still cries inside your fifty-year-old self,
pitying that foolish sophomore and, OK,
maybe never the same river twice but still,
always the same you, only more so.
Always the same little sister
in the red wool coat that matches yours,
your mother in her white uniform
laughing and talking in the tiny kitchen,
the same father home from work
with a package from the fish market that’s still moving.
The days are never wholly over,
and the losses pile up but you lean into them,
you think you’ve learned to take it. You’re fifty—
get over it—and still nineteen and still five,
and your little sister wakes up from a dream
screaming that the lobsters are in her bed,
and your mother is trying to show her there are no lobsters
and your father is yelling (your father is always yelling)
and you and your sister are both crying and you have no clue
that it will be you who tells the hospital yes,
take her corneas, and they will slice them from her eyes.
You won’t be there but you can imagine it,
and though you know she won’t feel it—
it wasn’t the actress, after all, or even the dog—
still you cry, and you are fifty and your sister is dead,
and you are nineteen and bawling in French 103,
and you are five and there are no lobsters
and your sister is right there
beside you in the room you share,
whispering to you in the dark.

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K. T. Landon is the 2013 winner of the Arts & Letters PRIMEPoetry Prize, a finalist in Jabberwock Review‘s 2014 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize for Poetry, and a two-time Pushcart nominee. She serves as a Poetry Reader for Muzzle, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, CALYX, and Ibbetson Street, among others.

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An Andalusian Dog was originally published in Arts & Letters PRIME 3.1

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image: Cyril Power, english 1872-1951, The Carcase 1929 colour linocut