A Dog Runs Through It Read online

  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)