The Chosen One - a Poem by Tom Sleigh

This poem is about God and dog. A man's angst, anger, frustrations and depressions in the moment of his approaching death are sprinkled deftly in this free flowing poem written by Tom Sleigh for Ploughshares. Here is the link: The Chosen One

The Chosen One

by Tom Sleigh

The embarrassment of wanting to pray to God, the demand that God give a good Goddamn had made him pretty nutty by the end; a lifelong Marxist, he took up with Ouspensky, then spent all his money (and he had tons, all those years in the bank when Das Kapital and the Wall Street Journal vied for subway reading time) on learning Gurdjieff Sufi dances, spinning round and round in an ecstasy of sweating, chanting, his happiness making him call you on the phone to tell you in a way that made you wince that he loved you for your holiness, regardless of your failings that he would then go on to list in rigorous, half humorous detail. But now, he was dying, and dying fast, and he was pissed; pissed at life, more pissed at death, most pissed at us, his useless fucking friends, hangdog, silent under his scorn, withstanding his tongue-lashings, then withdrawing to email, messages left on his machine. And through it all, only his little dog, a white terrier named Constanza, escaped his vitriol, his mortified, lacerating, self-annihilating rages set off, so he said, by God’s hatred, God’s malice, God’s need to get his hooks in you and twist you and turn you until His bullying was satisfied. And while he was saying this, his hand would drift down past the bedrails and immediately she was there, licking his fingers, looking up with complete canine accommodation, the reassuring tail wagging undismayed by the smell beginning to come off him. It was as if God put the dog in the room to uncover his friends as paltry Job’s comforters, in an accursed experiment to show how isolated death can make a man, so that only a dumb creature could be avid in its love, rising up as we fell down in the scale of his affections; and how he gave himself to that tongue, its absorbed, infantile bliss, the dog up on her hind legs coming out of her dogginess to meet him coming out of his God cursed pain: her tongue slathered and slurped his pungently acrid, irresistible salts, the soon to be carrion salts that gave to him such flavor—he, her chosen one, his skin and smell enveloping her in lusciously novel stinks and savors, as if only now was he the chrism, the oil her dog-hearted devotions had so long thirsted for.