By Maurya Simon | Contributing Columnist
One of my favorite holidays is National Dog Adoption Day. Whether a rescue or a service dog, a pedigree or a mongrel, all manner of canines have long been our loyal companions. For centuries, poets have written homages to dogs and archeologists have uncovered ancient Egyptian and Roman tombs inscribed to beloved household mutts.
We elicit a mutual exhilaration by merely playing with these ebullient friends, as Alicia Ostriker demonstrates in her poem:
“The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz”
As if there could be a world
Of absolute innocence
In which we forget ourselves
The owners throw sticks
And half-bald tennis balls
Toward the surf
And happy dogs leap after them
As if catapulted —
Black dogs, tan dogs,
Tubes of glorious muscle —
Pursuing pleasure
More than obedience
They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand,
Sometimes they’ll plunge straight into
The foaming breakers
Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence
Toss them, until they snap and sink
Teeth into floating wood
Then bound back to their owners
Shining wet, with passionate speed
For nothing,
For absolutely nothing but joy.
One of my favorite dog poems is by my friend, poet Cynthia Tuell. It memorializes her hiking companion, Molly, adapting the anaphoric structure of Christopher Smart’s great poem:
“Jubilate Canis”
After Christopher Smart, “For His Cat, Jeoffry” from “Jubilate Agno”
I will praise my dog Molly,
for she is good!
Praise her in the morning and the evening;
Praise her in the 3 a.m. of my soul,
for she curls her dogsbody asleep beside me;
for her paws smell of the earth and her fur of the wilderness;
for she counteracts the powers of darkness.
Praise her in her barking and in her restraint from barking;
Praise her in her sitting and in her lying down,
for even as a pup — gamboling ball of electric fluff — she barked the stentorian bark of the righteous;
yet she can practice discipline, quivering with the Urge but refraining;
for she can constrain and swallow her yawps and chantingly sing like a sitar deep in her throat.
Tuell captures Molly’s entertaining traits as she interacts with other animals while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains:
Praise her on fireroads and in canyons;
Praise her in the patches of snow,
for leashless she brisks about the Angeles;
for like her sister coyote she stalks the wild rodents and bounds after the deer;
(for since she is well-fed, she will do no harm;)
for in springtime she saunters, curiously browsing the tall grass, the lupine and paintbrush;
for she leaps, pirouetting midair above the buzz of rattler while her
prey, the squirrel, chatters high in the live oak and over us all soars the hawk.
This moving poem by Jack Gilbert recalls the comfort that dogs may provide us when we’re lonely or grieving:
“Alone”
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
Finally, here’s a memorable and heart-breaking elegy by famed novelist and poet, John Updike:
“Dog’s Death”
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.
Maurya Simon’s 11th poetry volume, “La Sirena: A Novella in Verse” (Cloudbank Books), appeared in April 2024.
