Necco's been at it again, with 'it' being either 'injuring himself' or 'animal hospital' (they're both true, so you pick). The dog is hapless. And yet--right now he's standing at the door, in his purple-polka-dotted cast, because he wants to go out and play in the snow (but the cast will get wet: Necco's trips outside right now involve suiting his cast up in a plastic bag and a neoprene sock). He doesn't know what it felt like for us to stand in the vet's office and hear that our dog might wind up three-legged if his tendons don't heal--he doesn't know that the same vet operated on him on Christmas Eve so he'd have a better chance of keeping that fourth leg. Necco is, after all, a dog. He doesn't know why he has a cast on his leg, he honors no holidays, he really likes snow and running around.

One of the earliest things I remember writing was a rumination on a dog's death (I was age eight), and I'm kind of tempted to go into the whole dog thing again here, like I did when I first started this blog and Necco swallowed a plastic bag. But mostly--hey, Necco, we're glad to have you home, you big dumb dog. You can't even read, and yet I'm writing to you. There you go: human-canine relationship, in a nutshell.

Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898

In the corner of an antique store
hanging by a nail, I bumped into
this water-stained, frayed-edge chart.
Ingenious at getting twenty-six birds—
from chimney swift to chipping sparrow,
all life-sized—on 27 x 42 inches,
Fuertes painted his stiff birds posed
in characteristic attitudes
on a convenient streamside dead tree, on reeds,
and on the wing in the background sky.

After I bought the chart and hung it
near the stairs, I found almost all twenty-six
are right here, going by
at various times outside my window.
Seeing the little golden crown on a kinglet,
or the tail-splash of red that sets off
the catbird’s silky grey, puts me in good cheer.
And there’s the sudden paradise of intimacy
when I turn my binoculars toward a house wren
nesting under the skewed lid of my propane tank.

None of this is life-changing
or halts the numbing dailiness of chores,
but since I hung this chart of birds,
I’ve come to think that what we know of our lives
often has nothing to do with understanding,
but with some accidental loveliness
we put our hopes in, the excess, say,
of a thrush fluting its elongated ee—oo – lay;
or the way a flock of goldfinches
yellow the air they fly through without asking.

-Robert Cording, 2012

Christmas Prelude

O little fleas
of speckled light
all dancing
like a satellite

O belly green trees
shaded vale
O shiny bobcat
winter trail

Amoebic rampage
squamous cock
a Chinese hairpiece
burly sock

A grilled banana
smashes gates
and mingeless badgers
venerate

The asses of the
winter trees
rock on fat asses
as you please

Be jumpy
or unhinged
with joy
enlightened
fry cakes
Staten hoy.

-Lisa Jarnot, 2008

Journey Into the Interior

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.

-Theodore Roethke, 1961

The Plain

A muddy-wheeled cart goes lurching
between the poplar trees' wide rows
just where the narrow track
cuts from the main road.

Crops, naked fields, horizon
and sky surround a single horse
and driver in a wide frame,
hiding them in fixity that never alters.

The distant here seems very near
and what's near seems far away:
all sing together as one--
everywhere furrows, lumps of clay--

horse, driver and small cart
rolling the work hours way
through slow centuries,
and buried by the nights and days.

-Sandor Weores, 1988