My guest today is friend and poet, Rodney Robertson, who lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada. Besides writing poetry, Rod delves into Shakespeare for students with close readings of his plays (Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet et al.) at his YouTube channel 5Quote Shakespeare (4K+ subscribers). Here for us, Rod the poet relays an encounter with a dog, and it is black. The art is by Rachel Howard (b. 1969), a British painter who does both abstract and figurative work using paint poured on canvas, with effects created by gravity, as can be seen above. At the Bookstore in my Thirty-Ninth Year Head bowed boxed in thought walled in the stained glass light of book-spines, I cannot see the gash of black four legged erect approach from behind. Attention too late, too sudden, a great black Great Dane smashes with black everything but black — Perfectly still. In perfect form. A thoroughbred obsidian crevasse of sinew bone and muscle. Unmoving. Unmoveable. An utter beauty utterly horrific in its patience.
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Thanks, Alan. Nice pairing. Very representative of what I saw that day.
Dripping blackness.