Daily poem, August 28 - 2009

I didn't know I was writing this for this reason, but it all seems to have happened anyway.


Write a poem about a dog
(for Edward M. Kennedy)


That’s all the instruction I was given, walking down the stairs
as the rain from Hurricane Danny wandered up the coast.
But I knew it couldn’t include the anticipatory words
that drag the reader on a leash to the dog grave
or the treacley memories of tennis balls never retrieved.
It had to be a poem about a breed hardly anybody knows,
maybe a Vizla or a Rhodesian Ridgeback,
sleeping in the deep shade on a lawn in Marshfield
on a street of antique Capes where there’s a yard sale to pay the taxes,
and everything arrayed out on the grass takes on the momentary promise
of a previous century. The patina and the verdigris and the tarnish, all authentic.
The lawn suggests a mantelpiece inside
where white and orange Staffordshire ceramic dogs flank pewter candlesticks,
and wing chairs’ plumped cushions receive the cats,
curled into their own oblivion, and there are paintings of the sea.
In other words, the Ridgeback doesn’t belong, but
he doesn’t know that his ancestral world has no Butternuts
and does not serve the kind of Mexican beer that holds a hint of chocolate
which his master pops as the afternoon heat deepens and sales dwindle.

I keep stopping the poem to look at faces on the television
as mourners speak of speak faith, and speak
of grief and comfort. A woman says about her son, lost at sea, ”He said,
“They’ll find him.”” And the commentator says, “They did.”
She ends her story with a sob, saying,
“I know we’ll meet in Paradise.”
And I think of people’s faith in Heaven—
their belief that someplace else waits for us.
How that changes the way we see the dog in the shade,
how we might overlook the moment, might not see the paradise
of the Ridgeback, so far from his homeland,
how he manages to be at home in the world of chocolate beers and Staffordshire,
How we forget the giving up of all that is not needed.