Sphinx on Stilts

Sphinx on Stilts

Sphinx on Stilts

When I was twenty-one, I wrote in
‘The Problem of Evil’ of how the partisans
always rather feared an odd
irrelevance of farce – and that today
a thin dog like a sphinx on stilts
would follow them forever aimlessly.
                                 When
Katharine and I were playing an adventure
video game a few years ago, such
a dog walked the lonely Seineside
in a Paris abandoned because of disaster –
tallish and thin, not old –
padding with gently urgent
mysterious intention in the light's empty
gold.    Later, I saw it on the news
running through the Rangoon streets
up and down and sideways with the crowds
when the Buddhist monks were killed, and
again it cantered and paced outside
the siege hotel in Mumbai endlessly
when Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked India.
That time it barked: loudly and often
not with aggression but a noise
demanding ‘solve this problem’. Every
now and again watching news I call
Katharine, ‘There’s that dog again.’
It is not of mystic significance, is not
Churchill’s Black Dog Depression or Agatha
Christie’s Hound of Death, with a provenance
somehow involving nuns. I doubt it lives
in the realm of Proper Nouns, nor is it calm
in complete reality.                     I think
when I think of it also of the Untouchable
toilet cleaners gunned-down by Lashkar
in the Mumbai Railway Station, the staff
of the Hogwartsy hotel who died for the patrons,
                                               after
a minute of ‘solve this problem’, perhaps. In
itself it seems to stay safe but is always
deeply situationally involved.    At first,
I thought of giving it to George Jeffreys and
promised Katharine I could do that later.
It could live in Mt.Druitt and peace
with Clare’s mother but would have to spend
some time in Quarantine, where it would
be restless, but not out of place,
no doubt, and – like its secret –
no doubt safe.