A DOG RUNS
THROUGH IT
Poems
Linda Pastan
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for Toby
CONTENTS
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Preface
The Great Dog of Night
The New Dog
In the Garden
Departures
Heartbeat
Domestic Animals
In the Walled Garden
Rivermist: for Roland Flint
On Seeing The Glass Menagerie: New York, 1946
I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M
Patterns
McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader
Applying to Bellagio
The Art of the Dog
Dog in the Manger
Pluto
Argos
The Animals
4 A.M.
Marking Time
I Sing or Weep
Renunciation
Life and Death on Masterpiece
Old Joke
Turnabout
All Night
Ghosts
The Ordinary
This Dog
Firing the Muse
Envoi
PREFACE
My first dog was named Rowdy. I was ten, an only child, and my parents thought a dog would be good company. But I had books for company. I wanted to sit under the shadow of the piano and simply read. Instead I had to walk the dog before I left for school and walk him again when I came home. The Grand Concourse, in the Bronx where we lived, had few trees. Rowdy would pee against apartment houses, against the tires of cars, and when people looked on disapprovingly I would pretend it was not me at the other end of the leash. Why didn’t I love Rowdy more? He was a black and white wire-haired terrier with a square face, handsome and well behaved, and I had few other things in my life to love. I have paid dearly for that deficiency by loving the dogs who followed him all too passionately, all too well.
There was the Welsh terrier Rusty, in my teens, also square faced but black and orange. I tried to teach him tricks; I even took him to an obedience class. But my father undid all my careful training by roughhousing with him and repeating the commands I had taught him as if they were jokes. I suffered and suffered more when I had to leave home for college, knowing that my dog would be both neglected and spoiled. When I learned, in my sophomore year, that the boy I was dating also had a dog named Rusty, I married him.
Una was the first dog of our married life, a Bedlington terrier who looked like a lamb. On Halloween we put a sign around the dog’s neck: “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” I named Una for a character in The Fairie Queen, though everyone thought I had named her for Charlie Chaplin’s wife Oona. But I had young children then, and I fear that though loved, Una was somewhat neglected in the chaos of family life.
Mowgli came next, the dog of my life. I say that in the spirit of a woman saying of a certain man: he was the love of my life. Mowgli was a Rhodesian ridge back, bred to hunt lions in Africa. He was a large, rust-colored hound with a swordlike ridge of hair growing down his back. Though fierce looking, he was gentle and loving, and he followed me around the house from task to task—from laundry to study to kitchen. Once, when he disappeared for three days, I spent hours searching the woods near our house, shouting his name and weeping copiously. My husband finally found him in a deep hole some builder had dug to test the soil for a septic tank. He borrowed a ladder and carried Mowgli up in his arms. A few years later, though, when we were out of town, Mowgli died of stomach torsion while in a boarding kennel. I have never put a dog in a kennel again.
Caleb was another ridgeback, one with what John Irving called terminal flatulence, modeling a dog after him in The Hotel New Hampshire. My daughter Rachel was eleven when we got Caleb, but he was too big to sit on her lap. It was a lap dog she really wanted, so we added a black miniature poodle, Tanya, to our family. He lived with us for twenty-one years, longer than any of our children did.
Annie was our penultimate dog, a Norwich terrier. She looked a little like a large Toto—a cairn terrier. I had seen one of her brothers at a friend’s house, perfectly trained, sitting and lying down and rolling over on command. Perhaps I thought Norwich terriers were born that way. Annie certainly wasn’t, but she was an easy and lovable dog, though she would drink water only if someone was petting her. People told me that she would drink if she became thirsty enough, but that was like telling me to let my baby cry himself to sleep, something I had never done.
And now we have Toby, our rescue dog, a gray mini-poodle mix. He is a bit longer than the usual mini-poodle, so perhaps there is some dachshund in his DNA. Our whole family seems to be rescuing dogs recently, a fine trend, and Toby is a delight. But we had been told he was six years old, and when later our vet told us he must be at least ten, it was too late to consider returning him. He might not live for many years, but then neither might we, and in any case, we were hooked.
What is it about dogs anyway, and dog people? We know who we are. We stop strangers on the street who just happen to be walking a dog, and we talk to them. We hang out in dog parks. We cross a street to greet an unknown dog on the other side. And when a dog appears early in a movie, we worry that something will happen to it by the end. In fact, someone has actually made an app where you can put in the name of a movie and it will tell you if the dog is going to die!
Some dog people have a kind of natural authority with dogs; dogs just know to obey them. I am not one of those people. I am more like the substitute teacher who walks into a classroom and every student relaxes and starts to text. My dogs jump on me, bark at me, pull on the leash when we walk. So why am I hooked?
President Truman was supposedly told that if you want to have a friend in Washington, you should get a dog. I live in Washington too, or nearby anyway, but I have lots of friends, so that’s not it. Nor is it simply the wish to have company or to be unconditionally loved. It’s something much more instinctive, even primal. Perhaps when our ancestors were domesticating dogs by long-ago campfires, a process that took years, we were learning to need them as they would learn to need us.
And so to this book. I knew I had written a number of poems about dogs over the years, but I was surprised when looking through my work to see how many dogs had sneaked onto a page about something else entirely, making the briefest of appearances. It reminded me of Toby, sneaking onto the forbidden couch when nobody was watching. This book is dedicated to him.
A DOG RUNS
THROUGH IT
The Great Dog of Night
John Wilde, oil on panel
The great dog of night
growls at the windows,
barks at the door.
Soon I must straddle
its sleek back and fly
over the fields
and rooftops
of sleep, above us
a vague moon
loose in the sky,
far ahead of us
morning.
The New Dog
Into the gravity of my life,
the serious ceremonies
of polish and paper and pen, has come
this manic animal
whose innocent disruptions
make nonsense
of my old simplicities
as if I needed him
to prove again that after
all the careful planning
anything can happen.
In the Garden
I tell my dog to sit
and he sits
and I give him
a biscuit.
I tell him to come
and he comes
and sits,
and I give him
a biscuit
again.
I tell my dog Lie Down!
and he sits,
looking up
at me with trust
and adoration.
I pause.
I give him
a biscuit.
This is the beginning
of love and
disobedience.
I was never meant
to be a god.
Departures
My dog barks under an empty tree
long after the squirrel has gone.
He barks and barks, and the squirrel
leaps ten trees away, leaving
the leaf tops trembling like trampolines
after an acrobat is through.
And he stands gazing up at her
who long ago stopped loving him
while that foolish dog still barks.
Heartbeat
The book says:
give the pup
a ticking clock to sleep with,
he’ll think
that it’s his mother.
When she left
he tried
a different life,
a different lover,
a ticking
clock.
Domestic Animals
The animals in this house
have dream claws and teeth
and shadow the rooms
at night, their furled tails dangerous.
In the morning, all sweet slobber,
the dog may yawn, the cat
make cat sounds deep
in its furred throat.
And who would guess
how they wait for dark
when into the green
jungle of our sleep
they insinuate
themselves, releasing
their terrible hunger.
In the Walled Garden
In the walled garden
where my illusions grow,
the lilac, watered, blooms all winter,
and innocence grows like moss
on the north side of every tree.
No ax or mower resides here—
green multiplies unimpeded—
and every morning all the dogs
of my long life jump up
to lick my face.
My father rests behind a hedge,
bard of my storied childhood,
and in the fading half life of ambition,
wanting and having merge.
Here flowers and flesh don’t wither.
Here you will never leave me.
Here poetry will save the world.
Rivermist: for Roland Flint
some thirty years ago, wrote
to ask for my business again,
offering us one free night’s board
for every three nights paid, I looked
at that name on the envelope: Rivermist,
imagining they were writing to say
that Mowgli was somehow alive,
the swordlike blade of fur still bristling
on his back; that he had waited
all these years for me to pick him up.
And though I’ve had four dogs since,
a small one at my feet right now, each
running too swiftly through his life and mine,
I could have wept, thinking of rivers and mists—
how in their wavering shadows
they had prefigured and concealed
the losses to come: mother and uncles, friends,
and Roland now, so newly dead, who
on the flyleaf of an early book once wrote,
in his careful, redemptive hand: with love
for Linda and Ira, and for Mowgli.
On Seeing The Glass Menagerie: New York, 1946
How did he know about my glass animals,
the way I dusted each one lovingly—the elephant
with its transparent curve of trunk, the blue-eyed hen,
the poodle with its curled, spun-sugar topknot?
How did he know about the awkward boys
who came to the door,
sons of my mother’s friends,
coerced into asking me out?
Ah, fragile zoo! Ah, adolescent callers!
I saw that play and knew that someone
understood me, knew that I could hide
in language the rest of my life.
I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friend.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upward
across bone, toward the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
Patterns
The way the gulls’ tracks in sand—
pattern of bisected triangles—are erased
by the breaking waves;
my mother pinning
the Vogue pattern onto the silky
blue fabric;
the long marching band of numbers: 4
is the square of 2, 16 the square
of 4, and so on;
sex and Samoa—
our adolescent take
on Patterns of Culture;
how history repeats itself:
war, and famine, and quiet
spells of peace;
our fragile days together: toast
and the morning paper, work
and wine and walking the dog
who marks
the usual hydrant, lamppost,
spindly tree.
What mortal patterns wait
in these aromatic tea leaves, in these
McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader
The sun is up,
the sun is always up.
The silent “e”
keeps watch,
and 26 strong stones
can build a wall of syllables
for Nell and Ned
and Ann.
Rab was such a good dog,
Mother. We left him
under the big tree
by the brook
to take care of the dolls
and the basket.
But Rab has run away.
The basket’s gone back to reeds
through which the night wind
blows; and mother was erased;
the dolls are painted harlots
in the Doll’s Museum.
Where did it go, Rose?
I don’t know;
away off, somewhere.
The fat hen
has left the nest.
I hand my daughter
this dusty book.
Framed in her window
the sky darkens to slate,
a lexicon of wandering stars.
Listen, child—the barking
in the distance
is Rab the dog star
trotting home
for dinner.
Applying to Bellagio
They take husbands,
but they don’t take dogs.
Ridiculous!
and all because
they fear that barking
may disturb the muse.
Just ask Calliope.
I’m sure she’d choose
a silky spaniel
with a fluent tail
for inspiration, not
some human male.
I guess I’ll have to stay
at home to write,
with dog and husband both
here, in plain sight.
The Art of the Dog
In Mary Cassatt’s Little Blue Armchair,
it’s not the child I look at but the Norwich terrier,
twin to mine, curled up on another armchair.
And in Picasso’s Boy With Dog, I want
to enter the famous Blue Period to pat it.
There are dogs in the cave paintings in France,
and the hounds in the Bayeux Tapestry
are stitched into the scene by hand, chasing
their embroidered prey right into art history.
It’s said that dogs in paintings
domesticate the scene or symbolize love,
that even a still life of flowers and fruit
may have a poodle or dachshund
hidden under the table.
Is a painted dog different
from a dog in a poem—from a dog,
like mine for instance, who follows
me from stanza to stanza as if I’m going
to throw a pencil for him to retrieve
instead of the usual ball?
Velasquez’s Maids of Honor . . .
Madame Renoir With a Dog . . . Van Eyck’s
marriage scene, complete with terrier. . . .
At night the museums echo