Reading about the Chauvet Cave Paintings, My Dog Vanishes, and I am Bereft

Each day the gap between the field

and what the field wants to be grows wider.

I used to be able to stand outside myself

to stare at the stars, then climb back in

quite comfortably. I used to be familiar

down in the mud,where astonishment

lies. Now, I find the cave within cave

analogy tiresome. Say a thing directly,

or go away. It’s hard to care when everything

conspires to vanish. Even the dog picked

himself up one afternoon to go die under

a tree, or so, my psychic neighbour claimed.

Here, then gone. The greatest mystery.

Today, at breakfast, a magician, sly of hand,

whisked a visiting card from out of his phone.

But can you coax the disappeared back

into existence? I wanted to ask.

Time comes for us

slow then fast then poof

Those prehistoric paintings of hands in caves—

palms dipped in red ochre—were they a kind

of Paleolithic calling card? Hello, it’s me!

The hand that made this hand. The hand

that will cease to exist but lives on here

in the darkness. I thought I would not be

able to bear the weight of this dog-shaped gap,

and for a while, I really was plundered,

attacked at the roots. But the body—sweet plum—

survives, tramples over grass, sings. Was it freedom

they were painting, those ancients? A dreamworld

of what no language could hold. All that untamed

awakening in chambers of firelight. Sweep of woolly

mammoth, broad-shouldered auroch, trance

of hunting lion. I imagine the dog taking his place

among the animals, stampeding across the cleft

in the limestone walls, turning towards the future,

without so much as a backward glance.