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 "Lying still in corners with a snout that's whitened and those soulful eyes..." |
The golden old retriever reached
a hoary age--
Decrepit, you might say--
Lying still in corners with a snout that’s whitened and
those soulful eyes,
A smelly pest no longer loved by most
Who once caressed her fondly after play.
But she’s
a bucketful of memories, both sweet and wry.
Easy was it, yes, to love a dog like her.
She drove you crazy with her frenzy
At the forest-park in springtime
Rolling joyously in mud,
Then jumping high exuberantly greeting hikers,
Placing pairs of perfect dirty paw-prints right across the front
of sweat-shirts snowy-white,
As if to leave a signature indelible
In mind, and memory, and eventually the closet of the pretty
passerby,
Who found her laundry-bill a modest price to pay
For such a giant burst of canine-true affection
Which came out of the blue.
The dog was overly
affectionate and not malicious,
Showing how she missed her mistress
Who’d matriculated in an East-Coast art school.
Now she raced about, as dogs will do,
To imitate a greyhound’s breakneck speed.
You’d throw a well-worn tennis ball to rip across the green
And off she’d fly like blurs of lightning bolts,
To catch it clean while lunging, leaping in the stratosphere
As proud of her performance virtuosity
As Paganini with his violin.
But where the fiddler
bowed to fans,
She just wagged a high-flown tail
That looked like desert bushes
Whipped about by windstorms.
She still walks
up hills, though puffing-wheezing now,
Too weak to soil those hikers’ sweats by leaping-stamping.
But we remember, and so does she, when slyly giving me
That knowing look as if inviting ball-fetch, “C’mon,
once again!!”
Now she mulls it over, passively yet grandly, as she thinks
Of winking at me, with her better eye. She knows, she knows!
©2008 by Paul Hertelendy. The illustration is a staff artist's version of a photograph. This poem first posted July 14, 2008.
Paul Hertelendy is critic
and webmaster for the arts-review web site www.artssf.com, and
is also the Piedmont (CA) Centennial poet laureate. To visit his
website, click here: PAUL
TO ACCESS PAUL HERTELENDY'S ARCHIVE OF COLUMNS
ON THIS SITE, CLICK HERE: HERTELENDY
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