Dog Blessings by June Cotner

Author:June Cotner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2017-09-21T19:12:46+00:00

Besty

He’s an old dog now, with just three legs

and a coarse harsh wheeze

that rousts me out of sleep

the way a baby’s crying stirs

uncertain rumors of another world.

He’s near the edge of something that I think is death,

and as the world grows quiet all around him,

I’m troubled most by his tranquility.

Once anything that moved or smelled could make him burn,

but now he’s even let go of desire,

like a kid who strings his name and address to a balloon,

and watches as it disappears above the trees and houses,

to wait for days for news from foreign towns that never comes;

now the morning sunlight in a warm red chair

and the leisurely savor of bitch on the wet guttered leaves

sustain him like prayer.

In his glory days he used to chase

airplanes across the yard, to race

in circles blind with joy around an apple tree

until his speed brought thinking to a standstill,

and his body blurred its outlines like the rising

sunlight buffeting a field of windy wheat,

or wind itself unthreading all the star—

entangled cirrus clouds that roam the moon like sheep

he must have known somehow to long for in a field

rock-ridged and sparse with heather, where the Hebrides

survey the ocean’s tumult and the far gulls cry,

where he could circle, ride, and prod, and raucous until dark.

I want to shepherd him across the last dark frozen grasses

into the silence below zero

when the wind has been stunned by its own bitter summons

and stars stand fixed in their ice black arteries

and any breath at all might turn the world to smoke.

And in that instant’s no-man’s-land when time

rolls up its sleeves to show

that it has nothing left to hide, no sleights or tricks,

I can turn back

and let him take his way alone from there

by smell, and heart, and what remains of eye and ear.

I pack a final snowball full of stars

and toss it out to where the horizon flickers

and watch him go for it,

still game on three legs in the deep powder,

and call out after him

until the emptiness inside each syllable works free,

Great Besty! Go get it Boy! Great Besty! Good Boy! Goodby

William Shullenberger

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