Walking The Temple Dog Poem by Denis Mair

Thanks for having the patience to read it through to the end. I am ambivalent about the affection lavished on dogs by humans. Perhaps it is a symptom of urban loneliness. Dogs were bred to be affectionate, so their affection is available on demand, like tap water. A cutting-edge artist or yogi has to maintain concentration, and keeping a dog may distract him or her from the path. A friend of mine who is devoted to yoga said that true yogis of the past avoided having emotional attachments to animals. They even avoided eating honey because their soul might be muddied by incurring a karmic debt to honeybees. That being said, I am still a fool for dogs. I like to observe them, and I feel sorry for them if they don't get enough exercise. Perhaps I am being too judgmental toward people (myself included) who form emotional bonds with dogs. In my poem I try to show the ridiculous side of human-canine companionship, but I also try to show the genuine bond that exists. John Steinbeck travelled around America with his dog Charly, but I think some novelists I admire probably had little to do with dogs (for instance Dostoyevsky) . Picasso was a dog lover. I cannot imagine writing poetry without borrowing an animal perspective sometimes. The inner world of a human being is built on a foundation of animal desires and motives. Imagining the life of animals helps us define how we fit into the Creation.

Thanks for coming along on the morning walk. I will reveal a secret I have kept until now. I want to write a series of poems called TEMPLE DOG. I have over twenty titles, and for every topic, there are things I really want to express, memories I have rehearsed and mulled over. The dog would be a focal point or window, to show people at a temple in Los Angeles. There were people from different waves of the Chinese diaspora: Taiwan, Mainland, Hong Kong. There were people of different temperaments, brought out in amusing incidents surrounding the dog. Also, my telling of those incidents would include portraits of the people, and how they made their way in an American setting. So picturing the island of a Chinese temple in the urban ocean of L.A. would be full of revelations. But that would have to emerge from everyday life, which is why my ideas for this series started crystallizing around the dog Lucky. I have the 20-plus titles and a few jotted notes for each, with lots of long-pent memories. If I could write WALKING, I can do the rest, but I have to summon up the love that will fuel the whole project. Also I have to hurry up and do it while the details are still floating about in my head. I know it is possible, because my friend Luo Ying wrote a series of narrative poems based on his memories of China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976, a period of leftist extremism) . Luo Ying was a boy then, but he wrote wonderful memory poems in his mid-50s. How did he do it? He took it as a personal responsibility to call out the events of that time before his own private tribunal. How did he go so far back and bring his boyhood alive, amid all the distractions of modern trends? He did it by the magic that a poet should command. But also, he worked hard. He used the resources of his company to sponsor an oral history project in his home province. He read oral histories from people of all walks of life who went through that period. Also, he organized and sponsored a conference that project. All of this revivified his memories. and he made a book of it. Later it was published in English translation under the title MEMORIES OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (University of Oklahoma Press) . So I know it is possible and I should do something like what he did, with the materials I have to hand.