Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.
Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,
Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,
The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,
Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,
The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,
As if she understood the wind and rain,
The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.
— O I am sad when I see dogs or children!
The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.
He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss;
twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls
and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth;
his pink tongue lolls.
I look for sticks of proper heft
to throw for him, while he sits, prim
and earnest in his love, if it is love.
Turn again, turn again,
Goose Clothilda, Goosie Jane.
Bright wooden waves of people creak
From houses built with coloured straws
Of heat; Dean Pasppus’ long nose snores
Harsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.
The wooden waves of people creak
Through the fields all water-sleek.
And in among the straws of light
Those bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight.
Whence he lies snoring like the moon
Clownish-white all afternoon.
Beneath the trees’ arsenical
Sharp woodwind tunes; heretical —
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’ t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’ s — oh
joy — actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
I’ m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’ re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,
I leave you in your garden.
In the yard
Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared
With boxer’ s vigilance and poet’ s rigour:
Dog-generations you have trained the vigour
That few can breed to train and fewer still
Control with the deliberate human will.
And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
"I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly.
"Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing."
Yin, an orange tabby, agrees
but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.
I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize
the one who bullies her. I once did that.
Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts
his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,
sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind,"
she purrs — her eyes horizontal, her mouth
an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly
I was 6 and
I lost my snake.
The table shook
I can do better
than this
and shambled
to the kitchen
to the scene
of the crime
I was green
I put my sneaker
down, little shoe
I felt the cold
metal tap
my calf
moo and everything
began to change.
I am 6
turned into lightning
wrote on the night
At 6, I was feathers
scales, I fell into
the slime of it, lit
They explained to me the bloody bandages
On the floor in the maternity ward in Rochester, N. Y.,
Cured the backache I acquired bowing to my old master,
Made me stop putting thumbtacks round my bed.
They showed me an officer on horseback,
Waving a saber next to a burning farmhouse
And a barefoot woman in a nightgown,
Throwing stones after him and calling him Lucifer.
The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret
With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.
We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.
The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
