Sister Cat

Frances Mayes

Some needs can never be filled, this poem reminds us.


Cat stands at the fridge,
Cries loudly for milk.
But I've filled her bowl.
Wild cat, I say, Sister,
Look, you have milk.
I clink my fingernail
Against the rim. Milk.
With down and liver,
A word I know she hears.
Her sad miaow. She runs
To me. She dips
In her whiskers but
Doesn't drink. As sometimes
I want the light on
When it is on. Or when
I saw the woman walking
toward my house and
I thought there's Frances.
Then looked in the car mirror
To be sure. She stalks
The room. She wants. Milk
Beyond milk. World beyond
This one, she cries.

from Ex Voto, 1995
Lost Roads Publishers, Little Rock, Ark.

Biscuit

Jane Kenyon

This short poem is about the
absolute trust of dogs.


The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his mouth
like a priest offering the host.

I can't bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bread, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.

from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, 1996
University of Arkansas Press

Before She Died

Karen Chase


When I look at the sky now, I look at it for you.
As if with enough attention, I could take it in for you.

With all the leaves gone almost from
the trees, I did not walk briskly through the field.

Late today with my dog Wool, I lay down in the upper field,
he panting and aged, me looking at the blue. Leaning

on him, I wondered how finite these lustered days seem
to you, A stand of hemlock across the lake catches

my eye. It will take a long time to know how it is
for you. Like a dog's lifetime -- long -- multiplied by sevens.

Shelter

R. S. Jones - an account of his dog Scout's adoption from a shelter


You paused outside to look into my cage.
I tried to play it right,
wanting to catch your eye with a shy glint in my own,
a soft bark, that said, "Choose me,"
in a canine grammar I hoped you'd understand.

Birch

Karen Shepard


You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I'll eat that.

Dog's Death

John Updike


She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog!
Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

POETSPEAK In Their Work, About Their Work

Dogs

Mary Oliver

Over the wide field the dark deer went running, five dogs screaming at his flanks, at his heels, my own two darlings among them lunging and buckling with desire as they leaped for the throat as they tried and tried again to bring him down. At the lake the deer plunged— I could hear the green wind of his breath tearing but the long legs never stopped till he clambered up the far shore.

The dogs moaned and screeched they flung themselves on the grass panting and steaming. It took hours but finally in the half-drowned light in the silence of the summer evening they woke from fitful naps, they stepped in their old good natures toward us look look into their eyes bright as planets under the long lashes here is such happiness when you speak their names! here is such unforced love! here is such shyness such courage! here is the shining rudimentary soul here is hope retching, the world as it is here is the black the red the bottomless pool.

Cat

J.R.R. Tolkien


The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom --
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.

Dog in Bed

Joyce Sidman


Nose tucked under tail.
You are a warm, furred planet
centered in my bed.
All night I orbit, tangle-limbed,
in the slim space
allotted to me.
If I accidentally
bump you from sleep,
you shift, groan,
drape your chin on my hip.
Oh that languid, movie-star drape!
I can never resist it.
Digging my fingers into your fur,
kneading,
I wonder:
How do you dream?
What do you adore?
Why should your black silk ears
feel like happiness?
This is how it is with love.
Once invited,
it steps in gently,
circles twice,
and takes up as much space
as you will give it.

Man and Dog

Siegfried Sassoon


Who's this—alone with stone and sky?
It's only my old dog and I—
It's only him; it's only me;
Alone with stone and grass and tree.

What share we most—we two together?
Smells, and awareness of the weather.
What is it makes us more than dust?
My trust in him; in me his trust.

Here's anyhow one decent thing
That life to man and dog can bring;
One decent thing, remultiplied
Till earth's last dog and man have died.

Dharma

Billy Collins


The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

The Blue Bowl

Jane Kenyon

This is a poem that addresses the difficult subject of burying a pet.



Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.

They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

from Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, 1996
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, copyright 1996 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon.

Poem (As the cat)

William Carlos Williams


As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jam closet
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

Alley Cat Love Song

Dana Gioia


Come into the garden, Fred,
For the neighborhood tabby is gone.
Come into the garden, Fred.
I have nothing but my flea collar on,
And the scent of catnip has gone to my head.
I'll wait by the screen door till dawn.
The fireflies court in the sweetgum tree.
The nightjar calls from the pine,
And she seems to say in her rhapsody,
"Oh, mustard-brown Fred, be mine!"
The full moon lights my whiskers afire,
And the fur goes erect on my spine.
I hear the frogs in the muddy lake
Croaking from shore to shore.
They've one swift season to soothe their ache.
In autumn they sing no more.
So ignore me now, and you'll hear my meow
As I scratch all night at the door.

from Interrogations at Noon, 2001
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN
Copyright 2001 by Dana Gioia.