It's been a day that deserves three poems.
Animals, eh? Someone famous once said, "the more time I spend in the company of men [ie humans], the more I like dogs". On that subject, here is a poem that I posted in 2010. Some of you weren't even born then, so...
Choosing a dog by William Stafford
"It's Love," they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.
Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.
The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for a while
but then maintenance gets to you.
When I get old I think I'll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal.
My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what's really there by the smell.
Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don't really want you to know -
it's too grim or ethereal.
And sometimes when they look into the fire
they see time going on and someone alone.
But they don't say anything.
...................................................
Then there's this one that appeared as one of my Fb posts, ages ago. It's not the whole poem, just three sections that appealed to me at the time. (How fortunate the blissful ignorance that blinkers some folk from any understanding that the first quoted section could be part of someone's life.)
from Having It Out With Melancholy by Jane Kenyon
4 Often
Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away
from the massive pain in sleep's
frail wicker coracle.
6 In and Out
The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.
Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life - in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh...
9 Wood Thrush
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
notes of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.
...................................................
And now this, which I hope Missa reads. The last four lines never fail to calm me.
Kissing a Horse by
Of the two, spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red –
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years – who’d let me
hold my face to his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping under half of one, just
so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart,
from a world that meant no harm.
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