And My Dog

by Sharon Thesen

Is a Libra too: me, Coleridge, Boomer
and the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, quel
quartet of busy minds and tents of vocabulary
even as we shovel the driveway
& shuffle off last night’s bad dream about,
once again, FAILING to meet the class until
the last day of term. Between the blood moon
and the horoscope, Coleridge’s eclipsed ship
sits becalmed near Antarctica with everyone
aboard going mad. Between losing my way
and forgetting to go, I stand at the counter
with my Timetable of Shame, my desire to
please, the stories and plots I’m dying to
share — those sentences surely will shake
the remaining souls in the back row
out of their torpor and redeem me when the Dean0
phones me up with a cold voice.
O Coleridge, with your airy visions!
O Pierre Trudeau, with your gabardine cape
and your diving board! O my dog,
lip–reader and semiotician:  show me the way