☀ Today's Poem: "A Dog Barking into the Night" Kevin Prufer

Creon's error is remarkable
when viewed as confusion
                                               about the proper placement
of the living and the dead,
for Antigone, whom he seals
in a cave, is a vital young woman and so
belongs in the sun.
It is her brother,
already dead on the sunlit battlefield,
who requires a tomb.

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It makes sense, therefore,
that Antigone hangs herself,
death being the circumstance
her placement demands.
Thus, Creon creates
from nothing
a situation that requires
two tombs.
                      It's like the saddest time
of my life.
                    Let me explain:

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One evening years ago
in Cleveland,
my brother and I
stood on his front porch smoking.
Our father was in the hospital
dying.
All night long,
a chained dog whimpered into the frozen night.
It isn't right, my brother said,
                                                                    to keep a dog
chained up like that.
  I nodded and took another drag,
smoke filling my lungs
  as a thought
fills the mind.
  And then we went inside.

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The next morning, as I got in my car,
ready to drive to the hospital,
I found that dog
frozen by the chain-link fence.
  Snow had crusted
over his chain. It wasn't right,

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of course. The dog
belonged inside. It was an error
of placement.
My father wasting away in his hospital bed—
at that point in his illness,
  he became an animal, too,

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his hands,
I'm not kidding,
looked like claws
curved around the remote control.
I will not forget how,
because he could not get out of bed,
and the nurses had grown
complacent,
I held his cock in my hand
while he pissed into a dirty drinking glass.
                                                                                                Thank you,
he said when he was through.

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                                                        And in that moment,
I could not remember him
the way I knew he'd once been,
a man, a human being,
more than the accumulation
of the failures
  of a dying animal body.
Hospitals

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do this to you. The rattle of pill carts,
the nurses and their iPads.
I was teaching a class
on Greek drama,
  and had come to that point in Antigone
where Creon realizes his error,
where, too late,
he corrects his mistake,
burying Antigone's brother
properly. By then, she has hanged
herself,
               making her placement in the cave abruptly
perfect.

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I had wanted a happier ending
for my father,
sitting by his bedside,
making notes in the margins
of my book.
At the back of the cancer ward,
the private elevator
was large enough for a gurney.
I imagined it went right down
a dark throat
to a basement.

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                                    I held his claw and read.
Soon, my brother would visit,
still angry about his neighbor's dog.
When the nurse asked
if we needed anything,
I didn't even look up from my book.
No,
I told her. My father was asleep.
The dog was dead.
Antigone was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl,
and then she was,
like her brother,
like all of us, eventually,
nowhere.