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Companion Animals
Becoming A Horse
It was dragging my hands along its belly, / loosing the bit and wiping the spit / from its mouth that made me / a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw, / a fly tasting its ear.
July 2012The Visit
It was late, & Mary, I thought, was already asleep when I figured to / make another stab at cleaning that insufferably cluttered desk / where I write my poems before turning in for the night.
May 2012Feral City
My husband, Lee, was the one who heard the abandoned kittens piping and squeaking like an off-key orchestra composed entirely of piccolos and penny whistles. They were hidden in the overgrown weeds of the front yard, and it was raining. There were six of them, looking like featherless baby birds.
May 2012
Selected Poems
— from “The Best Moment of the Night” | You had a moment with the dog, / down near the base of the butcher-block table / just as the party was getting started.
April 2012The Best Feeling In The World
4 AM under the big top, a prison cat, the highest pleasure
April 2012
Dog Days
Long past midnight Sam parted his mosquito net. He’d been in Namibia for a month, and each night he lay awake, listening to the corrugated-metal roof ping and the cinder-block walls pop as they cooled. He couldn’t adjust to his new surroundings: the language, the climate, the rural isolation.
May 2011
Weighing The Dog
It’s been months / since mud’s been stuck / to his paws, longer / since I’ve had to comb / any burs or ticks / from his thinning coat.
May 2011April 2011
Sure I work hard. So do many other people. I try to remember something my friend Robert once said: “All those doctors who complain that they worked so hard in medical school — compared to who? Someone who digs ditches all day? Someone who works two shifts at McDonald’s?”
April 2011October 2010
My cat Nimbus is sick. Oil is fouling the Gulf of Mexico. The veterinarian, who makes house calls, will arrive soon in his twenty-four-foot-long animal hospital on wheels. I wonder how many miles to the gallon it gets. But with my cat’s well-being at stake, do I really care?
October 2010The Primitive Tongue Of A Lesser Species
There’s nothing like an old dog to remind a man of his own decline. Just a few short years ago Jake and I used to take daily five-mile jogs together, but now we’ve both got arthritis — his in the hips, mine in the knee — and we’ve had to give them up. Instead we take long walks through the woods near our house.
October 2010
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