Maggie and Morning Love
Magnanimous mellifluence,
Attentive, affectionate, alert,
Good dog, as good as any
God could ever send to such as
I, the aging friend she trusted
Even at the end.
– The day after Maggie left us, April 23, 2013
When they join paws and dance together, friends
laugh at the dog and cat–they live apart
.
so much of their old lives. She mews for sport;
he barks for art, for music. When the bands
.
play at the games they both attend, his tail
begins to wag. She purrs at concerts when
.
at halftime other sports-nuts share the win
the home team pulled off with the final goal.
.
He thinks coaches are insane–all lean
and hungry for a win–who cares who gets
.
the bone? She catnaps sometimes in the seats
when all is pianissimo. He’ll lean
.
and stroke and pet her till her eyes are wide…
then they walk slowly home, still side by side.
.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Feb. 8, 2013
EDITOR’S APOLOGY: the blog doesn’t like poetry this morning. It won’t allow spaces…so periods are inserted to maintain the integrity of the verse.
“Dog Strikes Back at Cyberspace” brought this reply, or so I thought, from good friend Steve Shoemaker (aka “Shoe” ) in Urbana, Illinois. He seemed to have taken Sebastian’s side in the Shoe War.
Verse — “Heal”
I taught my dog to heel,
not so she’d be a slave,
but so she’d always be
safe to walk alongside of me.
…
When first I used a lead,
a leash and collar, she
would pull and jerk and try
to run away. She thought that I
…
was cruel and mean to make
her suffer so. But now
she leaves her pen with glee
as we, a team, explore the world.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 26, 2012
NOTE: The word “my” was not bolded or italicized in the Steve’s email. “Views from Edge” bolded and italicized “my” on the assumption that the Verse’s author was holding himself up as a man of virtue in contrast to the bad dog owner who hadn’t trained his dog properly. It turns out that “Dog Strikes Back at Cyberspace” wasn’t anywhere near his radar screen when he penned his Verse. Follow-up email from Steve: “Stop being so self-centered–I was not thinking of you and your sodden shoe at all when I wrote this. I wrote this for ___________” (who had asked him for a poem on healing in preparation for a sermon). 🙂
I think I’ll take a trip to Urbana for training… as a dog trainer…and healing.
Think dogs don’t reason as we do? Think their reasoning is less precise? That they act only on instinct? Have no purpose of forethought? Think they can’t talk?
Consider the shoe by the front door.
The shoes belong to the “dog-owner” who has been upstairs blogging obsessively, ignoring his dog’s persistent pestering. Sebastian pawed, scratched his back feet on the carpet, and barked. At first the blogger ignored him and then chastened for interrupting the important message he was preparing to send into cyberspace.
Dog surrenders. Disappears for 10 minutes. Returns and quietly, without a word, jumps up to his customary place on the sofa in the blogger’s office.
Blogger completes his thoughtfully reasoned cyberspace communication and decides it’s time to take the little guy out. Blogger goes downstairs, takes off his slippers, puts on the left shoe next to the leash by the front door, and winces.
Sebastian has left a perfectly directed, perfectly contained puddle in the shoe. No evidence to the side of the shoe or the back or front of the shoe. All of the message is IN the shoe, nature striking back at cyberspace with the clearest of messages carefully delivered with forethought and drone-like precision:
“Dad, you really pissed me off!!”
There is only now.
The Master, the Top Dog,
(the alpha male) is gone.
The new guy feeds us:
our eyes begin to go first to him.
…
We wait, we lounge, we mope
when he puts us out in the pen.
There is room to play,
but he may never return,
never let us back with the pack,
with the kind one, with the shorties…
…
He’s here now! We’re back inside!
There may be more food!
Search, bark, gambol, sniff,
tumble, lick, pretend to fight–
why is he taking us back outside
to the pen?
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Sept. 3, 2012
Click to learn more from rawgrief.com: Yours truly’s favorite form of adoration.
Views from the Edge 