Frankenstein Blinks

I erase the words.
Blow away graphite
and stained bits of Brazilian rubber.
They vanish into the peripheral
beyond the focus of my
what's-important-for-the-moment stare.
I try again.

Trickling sweat has the weight of pebbles,
Flushed skin, the taste of olives.
It takes athletic effort
to stretch my mind
and paint in words
the lucid sum
between heartache and hope.

I lift my pencil, erase the words.
Try again.

A million sunburned olympians concede defeat.

That's a start, and closer to the emotion I'm after.

Infinite truths fill single a day
shocking, Oppenheimer epiphanies.
I need only one.
A telling moment, a captured glory,
an aperture into pathos.

My attempt is like a suicide after a long, failed marriage
leaving only the hollow emptiness
of a hocked engagement ring.
On my page lay Frankenstein fragments of words
desperately trying to possess a single, meaningful spark.
The spark fades, and the words
die. I erase them, notice

something outside my window. A lanky, stray dog
shivering against January's feral cold.
His breath is a halo, his eyes, watery
in the nickel colored light. He falls.

Doesn't move.

Or later when I do
crossing scattered unopened bills
and down unshoveled steps.
My socks are sponges when I reach him.
My breaths hammered; and still
he doesn't move.

All creation stops within me.

Someone once said a poem
is a dream dressed in words.
I touch his cold body
feel a warm heart.

And every so often Frankenstein blinks.

The dog gets up and looks at me
and I at him.
Here a man, here a dog.
Something crazy passes between us
a private joke perhaps (psych, no hosannas for me, buddy!),
quantum physics, primordial understanding
like the pleasure found in old, exotic photographs.
My heart trips, more than when I found Endora dead.
Time unhindges and the mercurial moment

is gone. He pants cautiously

walks around me, nails clicking on icy pavement.
His wagging tail splits the air. He watches me,
rounds a corner fenced by the neighbor's lifeless hedges
is gone form my
what's-important-for-the-moment stare.
But in my mind, endures.

Endures.
I return to my open door.
My wife wonders about the funny grin on my face.