Some puppy space isn’t the best place…
A while ago I read a poem that put a golf ball in my throat.
If ever in your life you have felt love, then you have your armor that may keep you safe when you read it.
Wesley McNair writes about a puppy on a chain who cries when he strains into the collar at the periphery of his circular, desolate space:
“…Soon,
when there is no grass left in it
and he understands it is all he has,
he will snarl and bark whenever
he senses a threat to it.
Who would believe this small
sorrow could lead to such fury
no one would ever come near him?”
Do you have such a puppy space in your life? Can you stop barking?
Can you bring a friend inside the circle? Can you slip the collar?
Poem copyright ©2010 by Wesley McNair, “The Puppy,” from Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems, (David R. Godine, 2010). Posted by permission on www.PoetryFoundation.org
…and another thing:
I can tell you that the “puppy space” theme recurs in poetry, as in:
“…a junkyard puppy learns quickly how to dream…”
From “Luke’s Junkyard Song” by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver’s intuitive lines moved me to offer my own empathic intuition about the careless degradation of a dog’s world view from inside a forgotten fence:
One dog’s world
The fence is cruel, you understand,
it stops him short
but does not bar his gaze,
it is the edge of his patrol,
each day he takes those last steps forward
at a random spot,
and then, again, beyond that rusting truck,
and then, again, those last stiff steps
to another well-worn station at the fence
that makes his junkyard a prison.
The fence is cruel, you understand,
its wire links hide nothing
of the lively concourse and the duck-filled river,
the shipping docks and the tandem rail lines
outside his world.
The fence tempts his eye each day
to see a new future a few steps away,
to see another world he cannot understand.
This fence is his faux frontier,
more harsh because so near,
a lure with no reward,
a circle with no end, no beginning,
no escape…
He learned too soon to dream of getting through…
November 10, 2016
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…
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