This is merely to acknowledge the spectral presence of our dog, Pinka, whose spirit accompanies us on ghoulish shenanigans every October 31st, and whose life and untimely death are the subject of a poem titled “Two Years After Our Dog, Pinka, Got Hit by a Car on Halloween and Died Before Our Eyes as the Kids Howled in Ghost Costumes on the Front Lawn,” first published in Salamander and now collected in My Heresies.
Even in this photograph, Pinka was protesting the imbecility of the humans who did not take her everywhere with them, who could not, for example, bring her along on errands to the dentist, the county courthouse, the Friends of the Library bookstore, the thrift store, etc. etc. To be loved by Pinka was to be hounded by affection and attention. Even now, I am haunted by her habit of sitting on my feet when I used the restroom. May Pinka’s spectre continue to open the back door of the house at midnight so that she might sneak out and bark at squirrels, as she did tonight, valiantly.
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An unfortunate case of insomnia.
My flight leaves in 5 hours, which doesn’t explain why I’m awake, obsessing over a missing notebook. More than a decade ago, the Krakow notebook was stolen during a sojourn in New York City. “The memory of that notebook, or what it held, is useless – it serves no purpose – offers no way into life,” a therapy book would warn. “Bury it.”
But there is no way to bury an absent corpse. That is the problem. How can we bury the thing that does not belong to us?
In Virgil’s Aeneid, while traveling to the underworld to retrieve his father, Aeneas asks Sybil, his guide, what will happen to those whom Charon refuses to carry across the river. Sybil tells him those who are not allowed to pass to the underworld are the "helpless and graveless" souls, marked by the absence of a permanent resting place. Only when their bones are buried, can they be admitted. Otherwise, they will haunt the shore for a century before Charon is allowed to ferry them over.
The memory of my stolen notebook is a zombie that returns to unsettle my nights. There is a shadow of it and everything I write. An abortion metaphor.