Dog Songs (4 page)

Said Ricky to me one day, “Why is it you

don’t have a tail?”

Well, I just don’t. Maybe once upon a time

I had one, but not anymore.

“What happened? Did you have an accident?”

No, no. Things change. Sometimes. Over

time.

“You mean, maybe sometime I won’t get a walk,

I won’t get dinner? I won’t get hugs? That’s

scary, plain scary.”

No, no, it takes a really long time. In

fact, some things change, over time, and

some don’t.

“Well, how do I know what’s what?”

Day by day, Ricky. You find out.

Has anything changed that troubles you?

“Actually, nothing. I like everything a lot,

every day.”

Well, see? Just keep on liking things.

And praying.

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Yes you do. Every time you wake up and

love your life and the world, you’re

praying, my dear boy. I’m sure of it.

H
E IS AHEAD OF ME
in the fields, poking about in the grass. By the time I reach him the last of the newborn field mice are disappearing down his throat. His eyes roll upward to read my mood—praise, amusement or disapproval—but I only touch his head casually and walk on. Let him make his own judgment. The mice construct thick, cupped nests deep in the grass from which they travel along a multitude of tunneled paths—to the creek perhaps, or into the orchard to find a bruised apple or a leaf of mint, or buckberries. Then they hurry home again, to the peep and swirl of their nestlings. But these babes have been crunched on Ben’s molars, have begun the descent through darkness and acids toward transformation. I hope they were well crunched.

At home Ben “wolfs” his food, as the saying goes. He barely lifts his face from the bowl, scarcely breathes until all is gone. He came to us a lost dog, down from the Blue Ridge, and certainly he had known trouble and probably, at least for a while, hunger. He came with a split tongue, a wound mysterious and long healed, made perhaps on a roughly opened can, or by another dog during trough feeding. It is one of the secrets we will never know. The rip is an inch long, at the front of the tongue, not quite centered. Now the tongue brims forward on its final slide in two directions, or hangs to both sides of his right fang tooth, which stands above the mossy bulk of the tongue like a white bird on a pink sea.

Other quirks and mannerisms, frights and anxieties, Ben brought with him, and has kept. Mostly he wants reasonable things—quiet, security, both M. and me within sight. He is frightened of lightning, brooms, kindling, backfire, and trucks generally. He loves fields, freedom, rabbit-smell, rides in the car, lots of food. I think he can drink a gallon of water at a single stint. I think he can run for eight hours without halt. Or, he used to.

Where’s Ben?

Down in the creek, getting muddy.

Where’s Ben?

Out in the field eating mice again.

Where’s Ben?

Upstairs in his bedroom sleeping on his four

pillows and his blue blanket.

.

Of night and the dog: you cannot elaborate the dark thickness of it as he can, you cannot separate the rich, rank threads as they make their way through the grasses: mouse, vole, mink, nails of the fox then the thin stream of his urine, drops sticking to the grass blades, necklace of pale gold. And the rabbit—his paw smell, his juice or a single strand of fur, or a bleat from a gland under the white tail, or a bead of excrement, black pearls dropped off here and there. I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyes as if listening. But it is smell he is listening to. The wild, high music of smell, that we know so little about.

.

Tonight Ben charges up the yard; Bear follows. They run into the field and are gone. A soft wind, like a belt of silk, wraps the house. I follow them to the end of the field where I hear the long-eared owl, at wood’s edge, in one of the tall pines. All night the owl will sit there inventing his catty racket, except when he opens pale wings and drifts moth-like over the grass. I have seen both dogs look up as the bird floats by, and I suppose the field mouse hears it too, in the pebble of his tiny heart. Though I hear nothing.

.

Bear is small and white with a curly tail. He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp roughly with the big dogs. The brotherliness of the two, Ben and Bear, increases with each year. They have their separate habits, their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries without letup if the other is missing. They both bark rapturously and in support of each other. They both sneeze to express pleasure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment. In the car, when we are getting close to home and the smell of the ocean begins to surround them, they both sit bolt upright and hum.

With what vigor

and intention to please himself

the little white dog

flings himself into every puddle

on the muddy road.

.

Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds. Ben is devoted, he hates the door between us, is afraid of separation. But he had, for a number of years, a dog friend to whom he was also loyal. Every day they and a few others gathered into a noisy gang, and some of their games were bloody. Dog is docile, and then forgets. Dog promises then forgets. Voices call him. Wolf faces appear in dreams. He finds himself running over incredible lush or barren stretches of land, nothing any of us has ever seen. Deep in the dream, his paws twitch, his lip lifts. The dreaming dog leaps through the underbrush, enters the earth through a narrow tunnel, and is home. The dog wakes and the disturbance in his eyes when you say his name is a recognizable cloud. How glad he is to see you, and he sneezes a little to tell you so.

But ah! the falling-back, fading dream where he was almost
there
again, in the pure, rocky, weather-ruled beginning. Where he was almost wild again and knew nothing else but that life, no other possibility. A world of trees and dogs and the white moon, the nest, the breast, the heart-warming milk! The thick-mantled ferocity at the end of the tunnel, known as father, a warrior he himself would grow to be.

Dog promises and then forgets, blame him not. The tooth glitters in the ridged mouth. The fur lifts along the spine. He lifts a leg and sprays a radiant mist over a stone, or a dead toad, or somebody’s hat. He understands what is wanted; and tries, and tries again, and is good for a long time, and then forgets.

.

And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

 • • • 

T
HE
S
UMMER
B
EACH

Baba, Chico, Obediah, Phoebe, Abigail, Emily, Emma, Josie, Pushpa, Chester, Zara, Lucky, Benjamin, Bear, Henry, Atisha, Ollie, Beulah, Gussie, Cody, Angelina, Lightning, Holly, Suki, Buster, Bazougey, Tyler, Milo, Magic, Taffy, Buffy, Thumper, Katie, Petey, Bennie, Edie, Max, Luke, Jessie, Keesha, Jasper, Brick, Briar Rose.

Bear lifts his head and listens brightly. He growls in excitement and runs to the window to look. Is it a trick or a gift, my saying aloud the names of the dogs without producing the dogs? All winter he will hurry to listen to this puzzle, this strange and wonderful pleasure.

.

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 all the good attachments to that origin that we can 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 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.

.

Thunder that is still too far away for us to hear presses down on Ben’s ears and he wakes us and leans hot and chesty first against M., then against me, and listens to our slow, warm words that mean we love him. But when the storm has passed, he is brave again and wants to go out. We open the door and he glides away without a backward glance. It is early, in the blue and grainy air we can just see him running along the edge of the water, into the first pink suggestion of sunrise. And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness—his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world. 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?

The poem “For I Will Consider My Dog Percy” is obviously derivative of Christopher Smart’s poem “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry.” It is in no way an imitation except in style. Jeoffry wins entirely. But for a few days I simply stood upon the shoulders of that wondrous poem and began to think about Percy.

The lines in italics, except for the exchange of names and altering of verb tense from present to past, are Christopher Smart’s own, and in that way are acknowledged to be so.

M. O.

“Benjamin, Who Came from Who Knows Where” was first published in
The Bark
magazine, July/August 2008. “Bazougey” was first published in
The Bark
magazine, January/February 2007.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following works:

“The Storm” from
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems and Poems
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1999 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“Luke” and “Percy, Waiting for Ricky” from
Red Bird
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2008 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

“Her Grave” from
New and Selected Poems, Volume One
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1992 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

“The Dog Has Run Off Again” from
West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1997 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

“Holding on to Benjamin,” “Percy,” and “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night” from
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2005 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

“School” (originally published as “Percy (Six)”) from
Thirst
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2006 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

“Percy Wakes Me,” “The Sweetness of Dogs” and “Percy (2002–2009)” from
Swan
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2005 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

“Percy Speaks While I am Doing Taxes” from
The Truro Bear
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2010 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by per- mission of Beacon Press.

“For I Will Consider My Dog Percy” and “The First Time Percy Came Back” from
A Thousand Mornings
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © Mary Oliver, 2012. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

“Dog Talk” from
Long Life
by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 2005 Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group.