Woof! - National Poetry Month

I took Sharkles on a walk to the library with me yesterday to pick up two more Hardy Boys books on tape (the kids' new passion).

It's National Poetry Month, so when we left the library this gray-haired lady with a hemp purse stopped and asked if she could read me a poem. "I've got one about dogs!" she said, rustling around in her messy bag.

"Here it is!" she sang. Then she composed herself to read.

I was in a hurry (for no other reason than that Dane was home with a cough, waiting), but Sharkles sat next to me, and we listened to the poem:

Percy and Books (Eight)
by Mary Oliver

Percy does not like it when I read a book.
He puts his face over the top of it and moans.
He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.
The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.
The tide is out and the neighbor's dogs are playing.
But Percy, I say, Ideas! The elegance of language!
The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories
that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.
Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.
Let's go.

The poem is from Oliver's collection, Red Bird (2008)

And, on that note, my happy, sniffing, panting, gazing-up-at-me-adoringly dog and I jogged home.

Thursday Inspiration

I found one of my favorite poems ever in a box today. The poem was published in The Sun Magazine a long time ago - I have no idea which issue.



Essay on Compassion
RICHARD LEHNERT
--for Stephen Dunn

The cat curled against my wide foot's sole idles himself to sleep.
I tell myself he loves me, past food, warmth, shelter,
past my fingers' rough massage.

I think I know this to be true, but say
I tell myself to prove I'm no sentimental fool,
to leave me one ironic out.

When I cut my hand he lapped blood
where it pooled like cooling grease
but showed me more affection when I cried

for what I thought was loss of what I thought was love;
stared into my eyes, touched my cheek with one dry paw
until I looked away.

The paper tells the story: a giant sea turtle
carried a shipwrecked woman most of two days
before delivering her up to a fishing boat.

How would a biologist dismiss this
as coincidence of instincts, the woman saved
without the turtle caring?

How to explain the turtle's choice,
that it rose beneath the woman twice
before she let herself ride that hard back;

that it didn't dive once in two days;
that as much as we want to say so and do not,
it saved her life because it wanted to?

On every God-road known, compassion's the highest good.
I've never made or saved a life,
but, well-fed in calm salt water and good weather,

that turtle had no stronger thirst that day
than to try on a cast-off human goodness
to see how well it swam.

When this slack-ribbed cat, almost twenty, hearing gone,
gets up to walk his bones across the room, then stops,
seems to slowly reconsider, limps back to where he'd started,

I think it better to assume that when he seems to think
he thinks; that when he seems to love
he loves; that the turtle knew exactly what it did

and what would happen if it didn't.

A day in the life

A pencil is pinched in the grip of a hand.
His organs are squeezed until he feels
as if his heart is in his eraser
and his intestines are in his lead.
Each letter looped or straightened
stubs his toes, drags his heels;
each erased mistake balds his hair
in rough, uneven patches.
When the sentence is finished
he is dropped with a thud to the paper
where he nurses a tremendous headache.
The paper is none too pleased either:
he's a dull No. 2, heavy across her abdomen.


by Anjie Reynolds
August 2008