Dogwalking Poems

For my dog Alex
Thanks to Trina Allen and Hillary Hebert for their support.

Introduction:

One late August night in 2007, my wife called me into her office right across the hall from mine. “I want to show you something,” she said. “Your birthday present, if you want it.” And there on her computer screen, on the North Carolina Lab Rescue site, was this big, happy-looking and jet-black Labrador retriever named Alex. Now, black Labs have always been my favorite, even though I hadn’t had one in years. My black Lab puppy Brandy had disappeared over 25 years before.

Anyway, we decided to go look at the dog. One walk with Alex and I fell in love. There was some adjustment — at 67 pounds, he was about half again as much dog as we had wanted. He was on heartworm treatment and was quite thin, and in the next months he had bouts with various health problems. But Alex thrived on our love and care, and bearing out the Labrador reputation for being ravenous eaters, he soon weighed in at a healthy 90 pounds.

And I had a companion that provided benefits I could never have imagined. Alex was a faithful and loving friend and a guard dog that protected us by barking at suspected intruders and the UPS truck indiscriminately. But he also unexpectedly played a huge role in the resurgence of my poetry. I had been concentrating almost solely on the marketing writing that I do for a living, rarely writing poems even though my mother’s death six months before I met Alex had me emotionally distraught. But with my wife’s encouragement, I began to write again shortly after Alex joined our family. And I discovered something amazing, something wonderful.

Alex became my muse. On walk after walk, I would fall into an almost meditative state. I spent hour after hour with Alex, talking to him and thinking about my mom, my life and the world around me. And to my surprise, I found that for the first time in my life, I could carry whole poems, even two or three at a time, in my head during our walks. I would come home, type them into my computer, and revise them later. Also, our morning routine — Alex coming to my side of the bed, waking me, often before dawn, and me joining him outside on our deck as he explored the back yard — led me to jot down even more poetic ideas. I’m sure that now that my father has also passed, my dog and my writing will again take on increased importance.

You’ll find the proof of Alex’s influence in this collection. The poetry that is part meditation and part therapy for me is here. I am thankful every day that it is once again a part of my life. And a huge thanks goes out to Alex, companion, friend and muse. I couldn’t have done it without ya, big fella.

**

Green-eyed boy finds evidence of life before adulthood

Cast my memory back there lord …

It comes to you like daylight suddenly broadcast at midnight:
the hill where you walked with your collie
when you were a boy, ripe with berries as you inhaled
the biscuity scent of fresh hot summery grass.
Days that you ran everywhere that always ended only
with exhaustion, jubilant exhaustion and satisfied sleep
Days you couldn’t remember from one to the next,
one running into the other, but days that never had one iota
to do with death. Here it is: your heritage and legacy,
here are your facile summer days you lived
for fifteen blissful and innocent years. Now here
in this not-quite-dawn morning of someone else’s life—
yours? at least you claim it so—
you can’t quite remember the dog but you know he’s
almost as true black and blue as your best Labrador friend Alex,
and you remember the blackberries, raspberries and huckleberries
and the hot-tanned heat of the Pennsylvania fields like yesterday.
Walking up that hill, with your first innocent kiss, a pretty dark-haired
preteen girl in a dark basement yet to come, and all you know
so much of this, all you know is written, for you and by you
on the blank slate you were handed

… sometimes I’m overcome thinking ’bout …

**

A lesson from Alex the Labrador

laugh with me, sadness reigns too often
we have all said this, we poets
when it seems that to laugh is folly
be like my big beloved dog
sigh great sighs of sadness
laugh and jump with the ocean surf
between your teeth
get wet, soaked with the joy
becoming one with the waves
he lay beside my bed tonight
and sighed that gentle sigh
to whatever sadness, whatever
left unfulfilled and woke to another day
a day of mostly joy
and yes, it is mostly joy
show your master
how you jump and laugh and you have
the ocean between your teeth
jump and rejoice and feel
the ocean
meat between your teeth

**

A memory of the beach

ebb tide washing up, the last sliver
of silver dollar moon on the shore,
crescent and currency
you remember it sitting on the deck
you and your black dog hunched together
like two old winter shrubs
somewhere, everywhere somebody is sleeping
just not you, not now
3 a.m and the black sky crying
with slight moisture, not quite rain
hissing down like radio static
like the ocean rushing the seashore
the world is still turning
and this old boy
still loves his dog

**

My Labrador, my self

Alex comes to me
I’m on the couch half watching TV
puts his paw on my leg and looks at me
his big brown eyes in his black-rimmed sockets
speak of yearning, something beyond
whatever I am giving him at the moment
but I don’t quite know what it is
and I reach down
and touch his webfooted paw
look in his eyes
and realize

we are the same

**

An (old) boy and his dog

I woke this morning
sat on the deck in this sultry smoky August
another morning a little darker
I breathed deep, sniffed the air
with my black Labrador
noted the days docked short
by our seasons and as the sun
struggled to come out
sighed at the inevitability
of it all, the cold sneaking into this heat
like death claiming another corpse
then Alex sat down beside me
and I put my arm around him
and he wagged his dark club of a tail
and reminded me

not to think so much

**

Just walking the dog

Clearing space on the sidewalk tonight
for the sweet small-breasted girl jogging
slightly jiggling past my sagging flesh
I wrestle the big black Lab onto the street
off the sidewalk so she can pass
so youth can have its day
she doesn’t appear to notice and that
is so often the way it goes
I still notice nice bodies but
while I used to be excited now
I just notice and I’m sure they think
I’m some old guy if they think anything
but I steer my beloved dog out of the way
everything’s clear for all of us
and each of us can

see and steer our way
on our own path

**

The charm

Stroke the ears of your silky-furred dog
your big black beautiful Lab
and remember the soft coat
and sweet doggie smell of your first collie
remember fifty years and how soft and sweet
it can be
whatever your parents or women or anybody did to you
rubbing his soft black ears

makes it better

**

Another trite spring poem

a reviewer once criticized my poems
for not being about the big issues
as if my wife and my dog
and my seasonal affective disorder
and the death of my mother
and my feelings for my father
weren’t little pieces of that big puzzle
called life and death.
so here I am being trite and trivial again
but as many times as it’s been said
damn but a man is lucky
to be on this earth walking his dog
when it’s spring and this big green ball
is painted with magenta and yellow
and red and green
like a big old Christmas tree
and you can breathe deep in your lungs
and feel like you’re going to drown

in the fresh warm air

**

My dog knows

On my deck I read about some obscure Italian wines
made from Vermintino, Vernaccia and Tocai Friulano
and while they sound like pitchers
on the Yankees’ staff I have to try them
reading about them they seem like distant stars
that I’ve yet to see in the studded sky
and as the sun sets the mosquitoes have retreated
from their orbits around my legs and arms
and face, the planets that are their gravity.
I have one last drink, thinking about everything
from the irresistible creature pull of wine
to the miniscule lives of mosquitoes
and planets and atoms in their paths
and finally I figure out
what my dog has already known:
the mosquito bites on the body are not personal
but they are worthy of my attention.
the rest of the universe
is only for now
the perpetual now

but I need the wine to make it better
my dog
does not

**

My sweet black Labrador as guard dog

After our handyman installed the water heater,
Alex stood black and saber-toothed
atop the deck and would not let the man
pass from the yard to the house.
“I could tell from his bark
that he was serious,” the man said, shaking.
Having rescued Alex from certain death
at the pound, and having come so late
and uncertainly to love and the warmth
that comes with it, I understand
the ferocity that guards

a dream come true

**

On Christmas day in the morning

There’s a light that shines near the top
of the misty majestic Loblolly pines in our forest,
a dusk-to-dawn, perhaps, and each morning
my black dog shadow and I watch it flicker out
on the edge of dawn dark and dawn lighted.
It is at this blur between the edges, this assimilation
of one into another—love into love in bodies,
the sigh and lightning of sex, bodies melting
into the earth—all of this is here with me at the top
of mind and the top of this glorious day. And that light
that shines near the top of the trees: I would not lie to you,
it is there, was there, and while I don’t know how or who
turns it on and off I know it is there. I have glimpsed it,
near the top of the trees, and it belongs to me, to us,
beloved, it belongs.
A light rain begins to fall. Daylight takes its time arriving
and it’s hard to tell what lurks in the mist. But it is for us,
and it is clearer than anything in the morning fog.
Alex howls at the train, thinking it some dog god

calling to him alone

**

Still life with insomnia and dog

wakefulness invades like a tired sad virus
on some shore you’ve just begun to explore
your heart is slightly sick
but hopeful and the dog
is always by your side,
by your bed at night,
like a breathing valise
filled with all you require in life
an iron lung primed
with the only necessities

you’ll ever need

**

Frosty morning, warm blood coursing through the veins

Barely morning, star-bright as night
on the top step of the deck with my night-black Lab
and the moon I know as full
not quite visible through clouds
maybe caught in the branches of the great oak
in the back yard losing the last
of its leaves
it is cold now, leaning toward winter
times like this we are keenly aware
and we know what we do not know
and the season goes on and gets colder
and Alex and I come inside
it is warm
my wife snoozes peacefully
under the covers in our bed and I

come inside and start the coffee

**

Baseball, behind the trees

beyond the trees somewhere this evening
and early most May-September nights
the kids are playing ball
and I am blinded by a grove of trees
but my hearing is correspondingly acute
an ancient child walking his big black Lab
I hear an announcer and the crowd
and the bonk of aluminum bats striking horsehide
and the kids’ shouts and the stands roaring like thunder
after lightning in my day it was the sweet crack
of a Louisville Slugger Adirondack ash bat
but the part of the night in the present
is a comforting cliché: fresh-mown grass,
the whirr of lawnmowers, the promise of a full moon
the magnolia-sweet smell of onrushing summer
and beyond the cliché the oxymoron
of a sad happiness the sounds are the same
the feeling is the same as childhood

but if I had a mirror
it would tell me
summer is not the only season

that relentlessly rushes in

**

Debris

behind the trees and scrub
a moss green soccer ball
camouflaged in the underbrush
a black skateboard with a neon green skeleton
and a cracked back
a pancaked Budweiser can
and a used condom and its wrapper
separated by 40 feet

me and my big black Labrador
the only signs of life
among the used, the discarded, the broken
I want to clean it up but
it’s not my mess
around the corner, dog tracks in the concrete
like a tombstone, a record that something living
walked here and left its mark
Alex picks up the pace
as I hurry him home
to order an overvalued overpriced
old chapbook of my poems online
fighting the emptiness of feeling

used, discarded and broken

**

Thirty seconds of respect

I walk my beautiful black Lab Alex
in a nearby neighborhood
that we both like
we have a comfortable routine
45 minutes twice a day
so we’ve gotten to know
some people in the neighborhood
last week a woman in a maroon Chrysler
pulled alongside of us
her dog Pepper who sometimes
follows Alex and annoys us
beside her in the car
we talked briefly and she said,
“I don’t care if your dog
goes on my yard, just make sure
he doesn’t go on my flower beds
at the corner of the street.”
So now every time we pass
her yard, I tell Alex, “Sarah’s flowers
are up ahead,” and I make him
walk on the short leash
as we pass
I’m sure some days she’s inside
smiling as she sees us
pass her little flowerbed shrine
carefully giving her
her 30 seconds of respect

**

March 1st dogwalking poem

sixty-two, skies sunny and blue
a warm caressing breeze
the neighbor lady mowing her lawn
daffodils, forsythia and dandelions
suddenly flashing yellow
as I ease into spring
like sliding through a caution light
my dog beside me
is as big black and happy
as Shaquille O’Neal
and the once-cold earth
has again evolved enough
in her orbit

to begin to remember her green

**

Another moment of dogwalking Zen

walking Alex and a squirrel
so bouncy and playful
I want to chase it myself
leaps onto a springy bobbing shrub branch
and the dog on the long leash

chooses walking over pursuit

**

The tao of dogwalking

The left wrist snaps
when he strains or snuffles.
Correction. Stand fast
when he pulls the leash taut so
an acorn of behavior
cannot become an oak.
My right hand loops leash leather,
Fashioning a falconer’s glove,
shortening the span of rein
he’s allowed.
So wrapped up
in these little things
it’s a shock to stop
and notice autumn surrounding,
leaves cool fire and suede.
Woodsmoke seasons the air.
Alex sniffs and tugs a tad,
urging me to move.
This isn’t the way
we usually go.
And I realize I’ve never
been here before,
not just this street,
but surrounded by these leaves,
accompanied by this dog,
on this particular walk.
It’s taken me this long
to get here. And tomorrow
will be another walk,
another exploration.
Sometimes we need the leash
for correction. Sometimes the falconer’s glove
as a platform for soaring.
Moving with the smoky scent
like an oracle sniffing
for signs to the future,
shrugging and settling
for another day’s breath,
tomorrow to rise and again
tackle the blessed task

of trying to walk each day better.

**

For Alex

He sleeps on the deck
if I’m too long letting him
back inside
he’ll sleep anywhere
eat anything
but it’s my job
to teach him
it’s always OK to come inside
love is not optional
sleep warm, my friend.
Good dog. Good dog.

**

The following poems have been previously published:
“The tao of dogwalking” in SNReview.
“A lesson from Alex the Labrador, “An (old) boy and his dog” and “Baseball, behind the trees” in Word Catalyst.