A Dog Runs Through It Read online




  A DOG RUNS

  THROUGH IT

  Poems

  Linda Pastan

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  for Toby

  CONTENTS

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  Preface

  The Great Dog of Night

  The New Dog

  In the Garden

  Departures

  Heartbeat

  Domestic Animals

  In the Walled Garden

  Rivermist: for Roland Flint

  On Seeing The Glass Menagerie: New York, 1946

  I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M

  Patterns

  McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader

  Applying to Bellagio

  The Art of the Dog

  Dog in the Manger

  Pluto

  Argos

  The Animals

  4 A.M.

  Marking Time

  I Sing or Weep

  Renunciation

  Life and Death on Masterpiece

  Old Joke

  Turnabout

  All Night

  Ghosts

  The Ordinary

  This Dog

  Firing the Muse

  Envoi

  PREFACE

  My first dog was named Rowdy. I was ten, an only child, and my parents thought a dog would be good company. But I had books for company. I wanted to sit under the shadow of the piano and simply read. Instead I had to walk the dog before I left for school and walk him again when I came home. The Grand Concourse, in the Bronx where we lived, had few trees. Rowdy would pee against apartment houses, against the tires of cars, and when people looked on disapprovingly I would pretend it was not me at the other end of the leash. Why didn’t I love Rowdy more? He was a black and white wire-haired terrier with a square face, handsome and well behaved, and I had few other things in my life to love. I have paid dearly for that deficiency by loving the dogs who followed him all too passionately, all too well.

  There was the Welsh terrier Rusty, in my teens, also square faced but black and orange. I tried to teach him tricks; I even took him to an obedience class. But my father undid all my careful training by roughhousing with him and repeating the commands I had taught him as if they were jokes. I suffered and suffered more when I had to leave home for college, knowing that my dog would be both neglected and spoiled. When I learned, in my sophomore year, that the boy I was dating also had a dog named Rusty, I married him.

  Una was the first dog of our married life, a Bedlington terrier who looked like a lamb. On Halloween we put a sign around the dog’s neck: “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” I named Una for a character in The Fairie Queen, though everyone thought I had named her for Charlie Chaplin’s wife Oona. But I had young children then, and I fear that though loved, Una was somewhat neglected in the chaos of family life.

  Mowgli came next, the dog of my life. I say that in the spirit of a woman saying of a certain man: he was the love of my life. Mowgli was a Rhodesian ridge back, bred to hunt lions in Africa. He was a large, rust-colored hound with a swordlike ridge of hair growing down his back. Though fierce looking, he was gentle and loving, and he followed me around the house from task to task—from laundry to study to kitchen. Once, when he disappeared for three days, I spent hours searching the woods near our house, shouting his name and weeping copiously. My husband finally found him in a deep hole some builder had dug to test the soil for a septic tank. He borrowed a ladder and carried Mowgli up in his arms. A few years later, though, when we were out of town, Mowgli died of stomach torsion while in a boarding kennel. I have never put a dog in a kennel again.

  Caleb was another ridgeback, one with what John Irving called terminal flatulence, modeling a dog after him in The Hotel New Hampshire. My daughter Rachel was eleven when we got Caleb, but he was too big to sit on her lap. It was a lap dog she really wanted, so we added a black miniature poodle, Tanya, to our family. He lived with us for twenty-one years, longer than any of our children did.

  Annie was our penultimate dog, a Norwich terrier. She looked a little like a large Toto—a cairn terrier. I had seen one of her brothers at a friend’s house, perfectly trained, sitting and lying down and rolling over on command. Perhaps I thought Norwich terriers were born that way. Annie certainly wasn’t, but she was an easy and lovable dog, though she would drink water only if someone was petting her. People told me that she would drink if she became thirsty enough, but that was like telling me to let my baby cry himself to sleep, something I had never done.

  And now we have Toby, our rescue dog, a gray mini-poodle mix. He is a bit longer than the usual mini-poodle, so perhaps there is some dachshund in his DNA. Our whole family seems to be rescuing dogs recently, a fine trend, and Toby is a delight. But we had been told he was six years old, and when later our vet told us he must be at least ten, it was too late to consider returning him. He might not live for many years, but then neither might we, and in any case, we were hooked.

  What is it about dogs anyway, and dog people? We know who we are. We stop strangers on the street who just happen to be walking a dog, and we talk to them. We hang out in dog parks. We cross a street to greet an unknown dog on the other side. And when a dog appears early in a movie, we worry that something will happen to it by the end. In fact, someone has actually made an app where you can put in the name of a movie and it will tell you if the dog is going to die!

  Some dog people have a kind of natural authority with dogs; dogs just know to obey them. I am not one of those people. I am more like the substitute teacher who walks into a classroom and every student relaxes and starts to text. My dogs jump on me, bark at me, pull on the leash when we walk. So why am I hooked?

  President Truman was supposedly told that if you want to have a friend in Washington, you should get a dog. I live in Washington too, or nearby anyway, but I have lots of friends, so that’s not it. Nor is it simply the wish to have company or to be unconditionally loved. It’s something much more instinctive, even primal. Perhaps when our ancestors were domesticating dogs by long-ago campfires, a process that took years, we were learning to need them as they would learn to need us.

  And so to this book. I knew I had written a number of poems about dogs over the years, but I was surprised when looking through my work to see how many dogs had sneaked onto a page about something else entirely, making the briefest of appearances. It reminded me of Toby, sneaking onto the forbidden couch when nobody was watching. This book is dedicated to him.

  A DOG RUNS

  THROUGH IT

  The Great Dog of Night

  John Wilde, oil on panel

  The great dog of night

  growls at the windows,

  barks at the door.

  Soon I must straddle

  its sleek back and fly

  over the fields

  and rooftops

  of sleep, above us

  a vague moon

  loose in the sky,

  far ahead of us

  morning.

  The New Dog

  Into the gravity of my life,

  the serious ceremonies

  of polish and paper and pen, has come

  this manic animal

  whose innocent disruptions

  make nonsense

  of my old simplicities

  as if I needed him

  to prove again that after

  all the careful planning

  anything can happen.

  In the Garden

  I tell my dog to sit

  and he sits

  and I give him

  a biscuit.<
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  I tell him to come

  and he comes

  and sits,

  and I give him

  a biscuit

  again.

  I tell my dog Lie Down!

  and he sits,

  looking up

  at me with trust

  and adoration.

  I pause.

  I give him

  a biscuit.

  This is the beginning

  of love and

  disobedience.

  I was never meant

  to be a god.

  Departures

  My dog barks under an empty tree

  long after the squirrel has gone.

  He barks and barks, and the squirrel

  leaps ten trees away, leaving

  the leaf tops trembling like trampolines

  after an acrobat is through.

  And he stands gazing up at her

  who long ago stopped loving him

  while that foolish dog still barks.

  Heartbeat

  The book says:

  give the pup

  a ticking clock to sleep with,

  he’ll think

  that it’s his mother.

  When she left

  he tried

  a different life,

  a different lover,

  a ticking

  clock.

  Domestic Animals

  The animals in this house

  have dream claws and teeth

  and shadow the rooms

  at night, their furled tails dangerous.

  In the morning, all sweet slobber,

  the dog may yawn, the cat

  make cat sounds deep

  in its furred throat.

  And who would guess

  how they wait for dark

  when into the green

  jungle of our sleep

  they insinuate

  themselves, releasing

  their terrible hunger.

  In the Walled Garden

  In the walled garden

  where my illusions grow,

  the lilac, watered, blooms all winter,

  and innocence grows like moss

  on the north side of every tree.

  No ax or mower resides here—

  green multiplies unimpeded—

  and every morning all the dogs

  of my long life jump up

  to lick my face.

  My father rests behind a hedge,

  bard of my storied childhood,

  and in the fading half life of ambition,

  wanting and having merge.

  Here flowers and flesh don’t wither.

  Here you will never leave me.

  Here poetry will save the world.

  Rivermist: for Roland Flint

  When the kennel where my ridgeback died

  some thirty years ago, wrote

  to ask for my business again,

  offering us one free night’s board

  for every three nights paid, I looked

  at that name on the envelope: Rivermist,

  imagining they were writing to say

  that Mowgli was somehow alive,

  the swordlike blade of fur still bristling

  on his back; that he had waited

  all these years for me to pick him up.

  And though I’ve had four dogs since,

  a small one at my feet right now, each

  running too swiftly through his life and mine,

  I could have wept, thinking of rivers and mists—

  how in their wavering shadows

  they had prefigured and concealed

  the losses to come: mother and uncles, friends,

  and Roland now, so newly dead, who

  on the flyleaf of an early book once wrote,

  in his careful, redemptive hand: with love

  for Linda and Ira, and for Mowgli.

  On Seeing The Glass Menagerie: New York, 1946

  How did he know about my glass animals,

  the way I dusted each one lovingly—the elephant

  with its transparent curve of trunk, the blue-eyed hen,

  the poodle with its curled, spun-sugar topknot?

  How did he know about the awkward boys

  who came to the door,

  sons of my mother’s friends,

  coerced into asking me out?

  Ah, fragile zoo! Ah, adolescent callers!

  I saw that play and knew that someone

  understood me, knew that I could hide

  in language the rest of my life.

  I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M

  I am learning to abandon the world

  before it can abandon me.

  Already I have given up the moon

  and snow, closing my shades

  against the claims of white.

  And the world has taken

  my father, my friend.

  I have given up melodic lines of hills,

  moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.

  And every night I give my body up

  limb by limb, working upward

  across bone, toward the heart.

  But morning comes with small

  reprieves of coffee and birdsong.

  A tree outside the window

  which was simply shadow moments ago

  takes back its branches twig

  by leafy twig.

  And as I take my body back

  the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap

  as if to make amends.

  Patterns

  The way the gulls’ tracks in sand—

  pattern of bisected triangles—are erased

  by the breaking waves;

  my mother pinning

  the Vogue pattern onto the silky

  blue fabric;

  the long marching band of numbers: 4

  is the square of 2, 16 the square

  of 4, and so on;

  sex and Samoa—

  our adolescent take

  on Patterns of Culture;

  how history repeats itself:

  war, and famine, and quiet

  spells of peace;

  our fragile days together: toast

  and the morning paper, work

  and wine and walking the dog

  who marks

  the usual hydrant, lamppost,

  spindly tree.

  What mortal patterns wait

  in these aromatic tea leaves, in these

  indelible lines mapping my palm?

  McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader

  The sun is up,

  the sun is always up.

  The silent “e”

  keeps watch,

  and 26 strong stones

  can build a wall of syllables

  for Nell and Ned

  and Ann.

  Rab was such a good dog,

  Mother. We left him

  under the big tree

  by the brook

  to take care of the dolls

  and the basket.

  But Rab has run away.

  The basket’s gone back to reeds

  through which the night wind

  blows; and mother was erased;

  the dolls are painted harlots

  in the Doll’s Museum.

  Where did it go, Rose?

  I don’t know;

  away off, somewhere.

  The fat hen

  has left the nest.

  I hand my daughter

  this dusty book.

  Framed in her window

  the sky darkens to slate,

  a lexicon of wandering stars.

  Listen, child—the barking

  in the distance

  is Rab the dog star

  trotting home

  for dinner.

  Applying to Bellagio

  They take husbands,

  but they don’t take dogs.

  Ridiculous!

  and all because<
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  they fear that barking

  may disturb the muse.

  Just ask Calliope.

  I’m sure she’d choose

  a silky spaniel

  with a fluent tail

  for inspiration, not

  some human male.

  I guess I’ll have to stay

  at home to write,

  with dog and husband both

  here, in plain sight.

  The Art of the Dog

  In Mary Cassatt’s Little Blue Armchair,

  it’s not the child I look at but the Norwich terrier,

  twin to mine, curled up on another armchair.

  And in Picasso’s Boy With Dog, I want

  to enter the famous Blue Period to pat it.

  There are dogs in the cave paintings in France,

  and the hounds in the Bayeux Tapestry

  are stitched into the scene by hand, chasing

  their embroidered prey right into art history.

  It’s said that dogs in paintings

  domesticate the scene or symbolize love,

  that even a still life of flowers and fruit

  may have a poodle or dachshund

  hidden under the table.

  Is a painted dog different

  from a dog in a poem—from a dog,

  like mine for instance, who follows

  me from stanza to stanza as if I’m going

  to throw a pencil for him to retrieve

  instead of the usual ball?

  Velasquez’s Maids of Honor . . .

  Madame Renoir With a Dog . . . Van Eyck’s

  marriage scene, complete with terrier. . . .

  At night the museums echo