My Daughter's Dog
These are four poems written about my daughter's dog, Shadow, a male Siberian Huskey who lived with us for just over two years, until his death on December 28, 2013.
The first was written in January of 2012, the others in response to losing him.
He would have been eleven in March 2022
I like to pull
My daughter’s dog’s tail around
And tease his nose with it.
It’s still here,
I’ll tell him,
Right behind you,
Following you everywhere.
And he grabs onto it
With his mouth
And pulls himself
Around and around
Until he gets bored
And moves on.
Sometimes
My daughter’s dog
Races through the front door,
Skittering clickety clickety
Across the bamboo floor,
Turning towards the kitchen
Before he slams into the piano.
He must anticipate something remarkable,
Every moment being now,
To risk so much –
Like there’s really going to be
A pork chop in his food dish.
Finding none,
He stares at me,
Right eye red
In the reflected light.
You expect too much,
I tell him.
He’s a heavy sleeper.
One night,
A cougar cub stalked him
Within a couple of feet
On the dark deck
Before he awoke
From dream to nightmare.
He mostly sleeps inside now.
Some evenings,
When he
Comes in for the night,
He stretches out
Between the living room
And the kitchen,
Reaches out his front paw,
And tries to trip me
As I walk by.
He sings beautifully,
Although why he sings
Is beyond my ken.
It is as if he is moved from within
By some ancient wound to his heart
Or the heart of his kind,
The only trace
Being this long, blue wail
For everything lost and
Wild in the world.
My Daughter’s Dog
December 2013
My daughter’s dog
Is as much a part of me as breathing,
A constant in the metabolism of my day.
Beyond feed and water,
The choreography
Of moving around him
In my darkened room,
Walks up the road,
And beyond his song,
Predating the time his kind
First approached our fires,
There is the simple fact of temperature,
Of seeing him in the yard,
The patterns of black and white
Down his muzzle,
The feathered parabola of his tail,
And those ears,
Beacons of his breed,
Attuned to his every now.
Shadow come,
I say,
And here he is.
Except for this now,
This last now,
My face an inch from his,
My hand stroking the fur
Above his eye,
Over his temple,
Soft,
As if spun by spiders,
To the ready, white tufts at his ear,
Again and again,
My face so close to his,
Searching for him
In the sea of pupil,
Come back, Shadow,
Come back,
Until the vet touches my arm
Come back
And says
It’s time to let him go,
It’s time to let him go.
Dancing In The Dark
My daughter’s dog
Slept by the door
At the foot of my bed.
After 3 weeks,
My feet still search for him,
Remembering how we danced together
In the dark.
Falling Into A Hole
My daughter’s dog
Dug a hole by the garden gate.
Every now and then,
I fall into it
And remember
How easy it is
To miss someone
While sitting in the dark.
