Three Dog Day

“No, I don’t want another dog,” said my mother.

“You get attached.”

She said it two times before my father

brought home another dog.



Whenever she remembered their first dog,

her face brightened into shining happiness.



“He was a Cocker Spaniel”, she said.

“He was smart. You never needed to tell him anything.

He knew.

He guarded your baby carriage when I went shopping.

You don’t remember. He brought your father his shoes.”



Skippy was the Collie

Of flowing red and white hair,

Daredevil and fearless

Like a Spartan at Thermopylae.



He faced down cars and was run over.



In a last vast burst of overflowing energy

he galloped back onto the front porch

bloody and screaming and expired.



After that my Teddy Bear became important,

which he had never been before.



Half a decade later my mother said,

“I don’t want another dog. You get attached.”



The third dog was a boxer bitch.

When my father brought her home

she pranced down the hall to my mother

of the waiting white bright smile of mind.



Dusty died when I was in college.



She was a teenager in human years.



My mother held she was almost human,

and had mastered English, not just to understand,

but to make her meaning known.



“She could talk”, my mother said.

She nodded her head knowingly.

“You get attached,” she said.


[copyright EAC]

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N.B. Part of a much larger work, this poem stands alone as a dedication to the poet Belden Crane Johnson, whose Snake Blossoms, in its truth and simplicity, was, and remains, ahead of the times. Indeed, since the times have been in reverse for at least a generation, perhaps more ahead now than when it was first published.