by Linda Pastan
with the unleashed sound of barking.
Dog in the Manger
As if you’d keep your bones from other dogs
when you were done with them. What nonsense!
In any case, why manger? That Christmas child slept
in the barn with sheep and cows, not dogs.
And doggerel? Your bark
is so expressive
I think you’d choose a sonnet
with beef in it, if you could write.
Dog fight I understand, dog tired too—
you frequent the couch even wide awake.
But raining cats and dogs?
And going to the dogs—where would that be?
Why do I care? Language is where I live.
Besides, I have a dog in this fight.
Pluto
There’s the planet, of course
with its icy outcroppings, its moons,
and plutonium, which will light our way
to the future, if it doesn’t destroy us.
And plutocrat means wealth,
from the Greek, or power.
But for me it’s the dog
with the shiny nose and the stand-up ears
who clowned his way through
my sober childhood.
Argos
Shaggy and incontinent,
I have become the very legend
of fidelity. I am
more famous than the dog star
or those hounds of Charon’s
who nip at a man’s ankles
on his way to the underworld.
Even Penelope wanted
proof, and Eurykleia
had to see a scar.
But I knew what I knew—
what else are noses for?
Men are such needy creatures
Zeus himself comes to them
as an animal. I’ll take
my place gladly
among the bones and fleas
of this fragrant dung heap
and doze my doggy way
through history.
The Animals
When I see a suckling pig turn
on the spit, its mouth around
an apple, or feel the soft
muzzle of a horse
eating a windfall from my hand,
I think about the animals
when Eden closed down,
who stole no fruit themselves.
After feeding so long
from Adam’s outstretched hand
and sleeping under the mild stars,
flank to flank,
what did they do on freezing nights?
Still ignorant of nests and lairs
did they try to warm themselves
at the fiery leaves of the first autumn?
And how did they learn to sharpen
fangs and claws? Who taught them
the first lesson: that flesh
had been transformed to meat?
Tiger and Bear, Elk and Dove.
God saved them places on the Ark,
and Christ would honor them with
parables, calling himself the Lamb of God.
We train our dogs in strict obedience
at which we failed ourselves.
But sometimes the sound of barking
fills the night like distant artillery,
a sound as chilling as the bellow
of steers led up the ramps
of cattle cars whose gates swing
shut on them, as Eden’s did.
4 A.M.
I was the child until
my mother died;
now I’m the child again
afraid in the night
and sleep as elusive
as the past I cling to.
Old age is all
about saving what’s left—
my father’s heavy watch,
each tick a heartbeat,
my mother’s initialed handkerchiefs
still scenting the drawer.
Buttons without
their buttonholes.
Combs with missing teeth.
I try to keep awake
all day, to sleep at night,
with only the dog
for company—his weight
at my feet holding me
to the earth.
But the sheets are tangled ghosts
waiting to dress me
in their ironed robes.
Marking Time
The dog waits at the door
for someone who is not going to come.
And the door waits
on its rusted hinges, not knowing
whether to open or shut.
Even the path, overgrown
with weeds and brambles, waits
in its own winding purgatory.
See me spending the small change
of my days looking out one window,
then another, for someone
to come and wake me
from this stalled dream of a life,
the way the princess,
in her flowery glass coffin,
was wakened by a kiss. Or the dog,
withholding its serious bark,
could be rescued
by the person it is waiting for,
if only he were coming.
I Sing or Weep
I sing
or weep,
it is the same thing
to the animals,
it is almost
the same thing.
The dog puts his heavy head
in my lap
pretending to know.
His small thunder
brings no rain,
no relief to the leaves
that wait poised
on their stems
for the first sign of wind.
What will their trembling mean?
I feel a mortal weight
that stirs
like some sleeping creature
in my chest.
Song wakens it,
tears waken it.
The nerves follow
their separate paths
to the same shady place
where once simple Adam
named silence,
named speech,
and the animals smiled,
the animals wept,
under their branching horns.
Renunciation
Like flowers
with knife-sharp
petals—
scions
of the sunflower
family—
the bright arrows
of beauty are aimed
at the heart.
So pain hides
in the billowy garments
of pleasure,
wounding
the open eye,
the listening ear.
An end, please, to all
sensation. Close
the museums,
lock the keys of the pianos
in their long, dark
coffins.
I choose an unlit room
and medicinal
sleep. I summon
for company, only my old dog
and, dim and silent as fog,
my old ghosts.
Life and Death on Masterpiece
I want to die an old woman
sun-struck in a garden chair,
my dog at my feet, the way Old Jolyon
in The Forsyte Saga did,
the bees around him buzzing
with the sound saws make
in comic strips to mimic sleep.
And just last night, Mountstuart
in Any Human Heart
reduced his past
to cinders in a bonfire,
then settled in his chair,
half smiling
with accomplishment,
and was gone.
They both slipped
into death so gracefully,
their shr
ouds of brilliant sun
half blinding us, their viewers,
in prismatic light.
And the choirs of flowers
in their robes of color,
the gardens sliding into afternoon,
all testified that life itself
could be no better than this.
Old Joke
The children all are grown, the dog has died;
the old joke says that now life can begin,
the creaking door to freedom open wide.
But old age seems my fault, a kind of sin
precluding guilty pleasures—food and drink,
the luxuries of travel, even books.
Depression is the bed in which I sink,
my body primed for pain’s insidious hooks:
the swollen fingers and the stiffened back;
the way regret can pierce you with its knife;
the migraines like some medieval rack;
the winnowing of loved ones from my life.
For months I carried that old dog around,
helping her eat and cleaning up her mess.
Though she was deaf, I talked to her—each sound
the rough equivalent of a caress.
If memories are like the poems I wrote
but didn’t think quite good enough to save,
and if the final wisdoms I would quote
await that cold anthology: the grave,
then let the sun, at least, become a shawl
keeping me wrapped in warmth until the end;
my lawn a place where children’s children sprawl
next to the shy ghost of my canine friend.
Turnabout
The old dog used to herd me through the street
As if the leash were for my benefit,
And when our walk was over he would sit
A friendly jailer, zealous, at my feet.
My children would pretend that they felt fine
When I was anxious at some hurt of theirs
As if they were the parents, for the tears
At their predicaments were often mine.
And now against the whiteness of the sheet
My mother, white faced, comforts with the story
of Brahms, the boy, who couldn’t sleep for worry
Until a chord achieved its harmony,
So down the stairs he crept to play the C.
She means her death will make a circle complete.
All Night
The children have gone
through doors so small
we cannot follow
even if we stoop
and the dogs bark all night
hearing calls
in registers too high
for our frail senses.
We follow words instead
but they are only signposts
leading to other words
leaving us lost
in our own landscape.
We struggle merely to see
for the sun too has slipped away
hiding its tracks
in afterlight, to a place of unimagined
reds and golds
a place where children
lounge on grass
calling to dogs whose barking
they can still hear
all these years from home.
Ghosts
We abandon the dead. We abandon them.
—JOSEPH FASANO
We abandon the dead as they
abandoned us. But sometimes
my mother’s ghost sits at the foot of the bed
trying to comfort me for all
the other losses: my father longing
to be forgiven, to forgive;
the long line of cousins and aunts
patiently waiting their turns
to be remembered; the dogs
who were my shadows once
whining now at the gates of the afterlife.
My mother smoothes my pillow
as though it were a field of snow
ready to be plowed by dreams where
for brief moments my dead come back:
Jon as a toddler in my uncle’s army cap,
Franny with the rosary of days
slipping through her fingers.
At times I wander through
the library of graves, reading
the headstones, remembering a place
where the ashes I scattered once
blew back on the wind, staining
my forehead with their dark alphabet.
In the house where I grew up,
the same sentinel trees
shade the porch
as they shaded the green years
of my childhood when my dead
were alive and full of promise.
The Ordinary
It may happen on a day
of ordinary weather—
the usual assembled flowers,
or fallen leaves disheveling the grass.
You may be feeding the dog,
or sipping a cup of tea,
and then: the telegram;
or the phone call;
or the sharp pain traveling
the length of your left arm, or his.
And as your life is switched
to a different track (the landscape
through grimy windows
almost the same though
entirely different) you wonder
why the wind doesn’t
rage and blow as it does
so convincingly
in Lear, for instance.
It is pathetic fallacy
you long for—the roses
nothing but their thorns,
the downed leaves
subjects for a body count.
And as you lie in bed
like an effigy of yourself,
it is the ordinary
that comes to save you—
the china teacup waiting
to be washed, the old dog
whining to go out.
This Dog
Maybe I’ve chosen life—not just
the life of this dog I’ve rescued
from the shelter, but
my own life, mired in the same
books—Anna, Elizabeth,
Jane, the same
solitary walks—no tugging—
the doctors’ offices changed now
to cacophony at the vet’s.
I’ve chosen disruption and broken
sleep and the poetry of barking—
what does each growl mean?
how to parse the hidden syllables
of dogs, this dog? Maybe
it wasn’t a choice at all.
Firing the Muse
I am giving up the muse Calliope.
I have told her to pack up her pens and her inks
and to take her lyrical smile,
her coaxing ways, back to Mt. Helicon,
or at least to New York.
I will even write her a reference if she likes
to someone whose head is still fizzy
with iambs and trochees,
someone still hungry for the scent of laurel,
the taste of fame, for the pure astonishment of seeing
her own words blaze up on the page.
Let me lie in this hammock in the fading sun
without guilt or longing, just a glass
of cold white wine in one hand,
not even a book in the other. A dog
will lie at my feet who can’t read anyway,
loving me just for myself, and for
the biscuit I keep concealed in my pocket.
Envoi
We’re signing up for heartbreak,
We know one day we’ll rue it.
But oh the way our life lights up
The years a dog runs through it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“I Am Learning to Abandon the World” appeared in PM/AM (W. W. Norton,
1982); “Argos” appeared in The Imperfect Paradise (W. W. Norton, 1988); “Domestic Animals” appeared in Heroes in Disguise (W. W. Norton, 1991); “The Animals” and “McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader” first appeared in Carnival Evening (W. W. Norton, 1998); “In the Garden” appeared in The Last Uncle (W. W. Norton, 2002); “The Great Dog of Night,” “Firing the Muse,” “Rivermist,” and “The Walled Garden” appeared in Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton, 2006); “Old Joke” and “The Ordinary” first appeared in Traveling Light (W. W. Norton, 2015).
I’d also like to thank
Catamaran, the Courtland Review, Crysalis, the Gettysburg Review, the New Republic, Plume, and Valley Voices.
“Departures,” “Heartbeat,” and “I Sing or Weep” appeared in On the Way to the Zoo (Dryad Press, 1975).
“All Night” appeared in Even as We Sleep (Croissant Press, 1980).
ALSO BY LINDA PASTAN
A Perfect Circle of Sun
Aspects of Eve
The Five Stages of Grief
Waiting for My Life
PM/AM: New and Selected Poems
A Fraction of Darkness
The Imperfect Paradise
Heroes in Disguise
An Early Afterlife
Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems (1968–1998)