DOG/TROUSERS II

We came back from the pub by a different route that took us through the estate. The blocks looked unfamiliar from that vantage, as if the geometry was somehow wrong. Buildings that I'd gazed at from the oblique angle of the window where I smoke were raised in front of me. The space felt far bigger from down there - the view had suddenly developed depth. Two perceptions were abutting - the flattened window view of the disembodied eye and the somatic experience of being and moving in that space.

From that angle the dog trousers looked nothing like either dog or trousers. What I had taken to be a tangled set of legs or alternatively a tense, arched back were, in fact, sleeves. It was an apparently nearly new Nike hoodie, dark with three days' rain, appearing blackbrown under the sodium light. I picked it up, it was sodden and heavy, weighing about the same, I imagined, as the corpse of a small dog. We left it there, hung on some railings, somehow feeling it was ill omened - though in all probability it was simply accidentally dropped from a bag of stuff by someone moving out.

Later, I looked at it hanging there from the window, looking something like a shed skin. I still can't help thinking about it as dog skin. Still later, I went down to get it. I brought it indoors bundled into a plastic bag, and we washed it. It's a couple of sizes too big for either of us but we've kept it. it's cosy. But it's still not a top, it's various transformations have clung to it, for me. Dog-trousers-top. Dogskin.