Monday, June 22, 2015

Living With A Big Dog


This view of the house is an image from Google Maps.  The house is a corner property, though the street beside it is a gravel paved extension.  The house I am writing about is to the immediate left of the "H".  I live under it.

Stella is the part Irish Wolfhound who lives with us here on the promontory overlooking the Willamette, the railroad tracks and highway and the idle papermill below.  The promontory park is behind the house to the left.

I have posted several times this year various aspects of my life that include her.  I guess that shows how I am smitten by this large and gentle creature. She can be fierce if she thinks she needs to be.

She is silent in her approach. She comes around the corner and lays down at some point. I look over as I do my computer work and there she is as if by magic. That's the creepy part. Other times as this is a basement, she will thump down overhead and then do stuff that the floor amplifies. Most evenings I am the last guy awake and she spends those hours down here with me as if I need a guard or a minder. I probably do.

Living With A Big Dog

If you weren't so trustworthy
it would be creepy
what you do down here,
appearing on your towel
spread in the corner
with the tiniest
of your big dog sighs leaking
from your salt peppered
fur curly broad frame.
What is Irish about you
I wonder and what
some other wolfhound
dream fractional and extreme?
I have seen you fight,
don't care to again.
I like you best so wanting
to please us, trying
to understand how.

May 10, 2014 8:38 AM

The poem is part of my collaboration with Irene Toh which happened during spring of last year. See Orange Is A Fruit

2 comments:

  1. this is a lovely poem about a friend, even if the friend does have four legs and a slow waggy tail. And the possiblity that she just might like your company too, for a while, does enter into it...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. She prefers other more active people over me until the lonely hours when only she and I and the cat might be awake.

      Delete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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