In the exhaustion days of summer
we walk our fields and nap in our den
but we are pressed down by sadness
for Karen Who Is Tall is distant from us
now as many weeks as a dog has toes.
(She searches out the egging places of unmeaty frogs
and asks questions of their egg-encased puppies
that rest upon leaves.)
Huzzah a day comes
and she returns unto us.
We dance about her in ecstatic circles.
In celebration we carry in our mouths
small and furry objects plump with stuffing.
But, woe, with a day and another day, she departs again.
In anguish we rend our small and furry objects,
we scatter their stuffing about.
Leavings for leavings.
What happens now, my companion?
She harvests a bounty of fine provisions
and the good man Len comes to us
with his strong and capacious carriage.
We too depart from our den.
Exegesis and commentary
Frida's unusual sense of time is especially apparent in this verse of the book--her sense of how long Karen has been gone, how "now" is a constant. I'm not sure how those two things work together, but for her they seem too. Life has a past, of course, and a future--although she may normally experience that as anxiety ("what will happen to me if you leave" kind of thing), but everything is a day. (Okay, I cheated a little with the weeks as dog toes--it may actually have been more like "days in as many cycles as a dog has toes"--a more complex equation than it is expedient to express in our understanding.)
I also thought I might have been stretching it with the idea that Frida could understand what Karen is doing when she is away in the field, but here's the strange insight of the summer's events: just days before Karen's return, Nadja had her annual day at the salon in Brookline and came home with this bandana on:
Karen's frogs. So maybe the dogs do know.
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