Dog Songs

“of all the sights I love in this world— / and there are plenty—very near the top of / the list is this one: dogs without leashes.” (from “If You Are Holding This Book”)

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you / do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the / trees, or the laws which pertain to them.” (from “Her Grave”)

(and, from the last paragraph of the essay that closes the book, “Dog Talk”):
“Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also the good attachments of that origin that we keep

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also the good attachments of that origin that we keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of the forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.

The other dog--the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk--is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.

Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward. (117-118)

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Dogs: A Poem

A dog should be wild, unkempt,
It hair slick with the dirt and dandruff
Of life among the trees;

Pick out the burrs and needles by the fire,
The mud caked in balls like
A universe of worlds along his spine,

And toss aside those manufactured toys--
A dog plays with wood and earth only,
His teeth worn down by branches that have been

Shed by trees older than you and him,
Older than the blood that runs like rivers
Through both of your tired bodies;

A dog works with paws rough with the calluses
Of his ancestors, as though he were made
To dig trenches in which he will prepare for war:

Against the creatures he does not know,
The sounds he doesn't like to hear, the loneliness
In which you will eventually leave him.

A dog works with his eyes--bright ghostly novas
Rendered as marbles in a darkness
That your own eyes will never understand;

He understands that night is what he visits
Upon the animals of the forest, and that soon
This darkness will turn its allegiances.

Let this tired warrior curl up beside you,
And let the fire of his heart compete against
The fire of your hearth, burning your skin

Like a tattoo one thousand years in the making--
A carving on a cave wall, initials in the bark of a tree,
A fortress of rock that is scarred by rain.

Tomorrow you and he will rest,
Eyes unable to see the shadows around you,
Of man and beast traipsing in from the past,

Stopping only to wipe their feet on the rug
While the man, his eyes adjusting, slides a hand
Down behind two tired ears, and scratches.

(c) 2014