Bonedog is a poem featuring in the movie ‘I’m thinking of ending things’ which released in the year 2020, a poem by Eva H.D. as a matter of fact. The poem is recited in the movie by the protagonist Lucy, who is Jake’s girlfriend.
The poem goes like this…
‘Coming home is terrible
Whether the dog licks your face or not
Whether you have a wife or wife shaped loneliness waiting for you.
Coming home is terribly lonely….
so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure
back where you have just come from
with fondness ..
because everything’s worse once you’re home.
You think of the vermin clinging to the grass
Stalks long hours on the road
Roadside assistance and ice-creams
And the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences
With longing because you didn’t want to return.
Coming home is just awful…
And the home style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise.
Clouds , such as they are
Are in fact suspect and made from different material than those you left behind.
You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth …
returned, remaindered.
ill met by moonlight, unhappy to be back,
Slack in all the wrong spots.
Seamy suit of clothes,
Dishrag -ratty , worn , you return home –
Moonlanded, foreign.
The earth’s gravitational pull, an effort now redoubled …
Dragging your shoelaces loose..
And your shoulders etching deeper than the stanza of worry on your forehead.
You return home.. deepened , a parched well…
Linked to tomorrow…by a frail strand of ….
Anyway
You sigh into the onslaught of identical days
One might as well..at a time.
Well….anyway, you’re back.
The sun goes up and down like a tired whore,
The weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older
Nothing moves, but the shifting tides of salt in your body.
Your vision bleaks
You carry your own weather with you..
The big blue whale…a skeletal darkness….;
You come back……
You come back with X-ray vision ..
Your eyes have become a hunger.
You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone …
Everything you see now ..all of it…..BONE.’