The Dogs of Persia

​
Pausing to light his pipe,
Jack looks at me over the flame
and curves his eyebrows upward,
as if he would ask a question
but instead tells me about the novel
he is writing about his university days
in Tehran and his first love
which ended badly, he says,
after he burnt down her father’s house, 
preferring the symbolic gesture to refusals,
blood oaths, and false anger.

“Besides,” he says, “I didn’t love her anymore.”

We walk in silence for a while
stopping to listen to a bird cry
to its mate, a plaintive wail in the sudden 
sun drenched clearing just before
we come upon the tangle of blueberry bushes ripe with fruit;
the dense fragrance of berries reaching us first.

Then Jack tells me how he paid the penalty
with his own exile and journey to America,
leaving behind his father, friends, and favorite dogs.
“There’s always a price to pay,” he says.
And we haggle over who will taste the first blueberries, 
then the way truth is revealed to the wounded,
next the stewardship of words and their meaning,
like poets we want to know why there’s no passion
left in life or love, in song or speech;
trading truths & small lies, then abandoning language,
until finally I realize we are bargaining for life itself, 
exchanging the stars for the lights
of a far away city, and the sound of raindrops 
for the wounded barking of long forgotten dogs.