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Bestiary in Which I Have Often Been Wrong

 

 

A few weeks later, I dream the bird is not dead. I dream it is alive and lives in a

mall downtown. I dream it has grown large, the size of a turkey really, and has

a long beak, like a puppet in a Jim Henson show, and has no feathers, is

buzzed, and speaks to say it is living in a bucket. The mall is half-empty, a nest

that has long been abandoned, and there is a corridor that opens unto the

pavement on Chacon Street where everything is covered in grease, as though

the whole street is a giant parking lot where the same car each day leaks oil. I

dream that I wake up and the moon sits like a broken button against the pale

blue fabric of the air. And Buster, yet again, thinks there is another animal in

the yard, is convinced there is an animal in the yard. There is nothing in the

yard. And yet he runs from one ghost to the next. I dream this and think, as I

imagine it, how sad it is to believe in something, how sad it is to be wrong. Or

is it that belief is more real than what is real, that Buster is right and the bird is

really there? When it comes to Buster, I have often been wrong.   

I have often reprimanded him for barking at nothing, only to find an iguana

shading under the old rusty galvanise in the yard, its claws like a falcon’s

talons. 

                                                                                         

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Andre Bagoo's latest books are Narcissus, The Dreaming and The Undiscovered Country. He lives in Trinidad with his dog Chaplin. www.andrebagoo.com

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