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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