Little short poems that live in my notebooks

The literary world, so full of epics and 40-line free verse and fat sestinas, doesn’t seem to have much room for little short poems. So these babies don’t get out much. It’s okay, little poems–don’t be scared.

* * *

Call

The dog’s note, a word.

We know his bark at night

like your daughter’s voice on the phone

saying she’s fine, but can she come over,

a stranger laughing behind her,

can she have dinner,

can she please come home.

* * *

Change

Her laugh

like a coin

in the laundry dryer

of your heart—

seven more minutes

warm,

maybe eight.

* * *

Evening, July

The cat slides two paws

under the screen door. Outside,

wind scratches the grass.

* * *

Tag

She writes goodbye on her nametag,

avoiding that middle step

of breakfasts at the window

and nights on the steel chairs

of the hospital. She says

it was nice to know you,

fixes her lipstick

in the smooth face

of a steak knife.

* * *

Horse Dreams

ten years old

Pinto, paint,

apple-drop gray,

red roan, tunnel black,

stone-eyed

Assyrian chargers,

then a neck,

a river-run shoulder, gone

back to the night

where all the horses sleep,

where I keep

a small saddle.

Book review: A Day, a Dog

A Day, a Dog

By Gabrielle Vincent

Front Street Inc., 1999

$16.95 hardcover

This book was such a discovery that I remember exactly where I was when I first saw it several years ago. The dog on the cover caught my eye at M Is for Mystery, San Mateo’s great bookshop. I opened it to the first page, and within a minute I had tears in my eyes. By the time I’d finished it (it’s a picture book; it doesn’t take long), I knew that in the name of kindness and of all good things in the universe, I had to buy it. This book is that profound.

In spare, exquisite charcoal drawings, Belgian author/illustrator Gabrielle Vincent begins with a heartbreaking image: a dog being thrown from a car. The dog chases it, but the car speeds away until he’s exhausted, confused, despondent. How do we know a dog is despondent? That is the secret of this book: Vincent’s remarkable ability to depict body language with a few simple lines. We follow the dog through the first day of his sudden, unwanted freedom, wandering roadways, causing a traffic accident, roaming a desolate beach, and finally skulking through back alleys. In the end, Vincent leaves us on a hopeful note (which I won’t give away), and we’re left to draw our own conclusions. Does the dog find happiness? I have to believe he does. It still chokes me up to think about it.

Though Vincent is known for her children’s stories, this book would have disturbed me as a kid. But perhaps with gentle parental guidance, it can be a catalyst to helping children understand their responsibility toward other living creatures. For the rest of us, it’s both a harsh reminder of how cruel people can be and an affirmation that compassion for animals is a gift we can—and should—offer every day of our own lives.

List: Possible Reasons Why My Cat Is Fat

Is on a “calorie-counting” diet but can’t count.

Does not use rowing machine enough.

Orders out during the day.

Does not want my other fat cat to feel self-conscious.

Blew out a knee while attacking a burglar.

Will not switch to margarine.

Surreptitiously takes bites out of me as I sleep.

Diet pills make him bitchy.

Will only do ab crunches if treats are involved.

Idolizes Glen “Big Baby” Davis.

Father was also fat.

Is depressed about the economy.

Hot Pockets.

Book Review: Lives of the Monster Dogs

Lives of the Monster Dogs

by Kirsten Bakis

Warner Books, 1997,

$12.99 trade paper

This is not your father’s Frankenstein. Not his Lord of the Flies, either. It’s a little of both.

Lives of the Monster Dogs begins with mad scientist Augustus Rank getting his kicks by amputating and reattaching cows’ legs. (Animal lovers will be cringing for about ten pages, but it’s worth the trouble.) When he decides to build an army of genetically engineered animals, Rank chooses dogs for their loyalty and unthinking savagery. He finds a quiet spot to carry out his research—an enclave in the frozen reaches of northern Canada—and spends the next few decades constructing a small army-in-training of highly intelligent dogs. And then he dies.

That’s when the Lord of the Flies part begins. The dogs are trained to walk upright, wear clothing and prosthetic hands, and speak English through voice-synthesis boxes. Without the charismatic Rank to lead them, the dogs realize that they’re basically slaves, and they rebel against their human captors—with spectacular success.

Then, in a wonderful twist, the liberated dogs find their way to Manhattan, where they’re instantly embraced as celebrities. They take up residence at the Plaza Hotel, are featured in a Vanity Fair photo spread, and throw lavish parties for their enthralled fans. The media and public are so fascinated by these exotic, erudite creatures that they’re willing to forgive the dogs of their bloody past. But there’s trouble ahead: The dogs’ genetic engineering is breaking down, and one by one, they’re reverting to their natural doglike state—an “illness” the sophisticated dogs find shameful and terrifying.

Bakis covers a great scope of ideas here: what is human, what is celebrity, and whether we’ll ever be able to navigate the ethical dilemmas of manufacturing living creatures. The resulting novel is a melancholy and entertaining fever dream—thought provoking, highly imaginative, and highly recommended.

Would You Like Some Advice With That?

Shopkeepers are wonderful. They sell us soap and batteries, bag it all up with a smile, and then proceed to tell us how to run our lives.

Or maybe that only happens to me.

As a single person, I’m used to getting advice from family and friends, suggestions that I take this class or buy that dress, all in the interests of netting a man. They seem to feel I’ve made a blunder by not getting married, and it’s their duty to help me straighten it out.

But twice now, that well-meaning prying has spilled over into shopkeepers. Once, at a produce store, the man at the checkout stand was weighing my one yam, my one crookneck squash, and my single serving of green beans. He shook his head, looked me in the eye and said, “You need to get married.” Another time, while bagging my items on a hot day, a vendor at the farmer's market asked me if I was heading out to the lake that afternoon. No, I said. She asked if I was married or had kids. No, I said. “Well,” she cheerfully offered, “you might as well go to the lake. It's not like you've got anything else to do.”

Now, I realize these shopkeepers were just trying to be neighborly. But it made me realize that single people are one of our culture’s last remaining punching bags: poor schlumps who have so obviously erred that they deserve—indeed, need—unsolicited advice. There’s probably some patriarchal, Judeo-Christian mumbo-jumbo going on here, but I’m not going to think about that. I’m going to go home and enjoy…the sound of no one talking. The wild taste of a single yam.

WWJFD (What Would Jessica Fletcher Do?)

My grandmother was crazy about Murder, She Wrote. I used to think that was very grandma-ish of her; it made sense that she’d like Jessica Fletcher, a plucky detective who was roughly her age. And a bonus was that she could follow the plotline without having to see the TV screen—my grandmother was legally blind. So, in my mind, Murder, She Wrote joined The Lawrence Welk Show and Gunsmoke as another TV dinosaur that only my grandma could love.

But one day about ten years ago—probably when I was sick, because that’s when I watch reruns from the ’80s—I happened upon an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I’d never really watched it before, but a guest star caught my eye, some comforting face from my childhood like Ben Murphy or Shirley Jones. The plot was a tidy puzzle, with clues scattered like treasures at a mildly intriguing garage sale. It was fun and soothing in a perverse, murder-y sort of way. I watched another. And another.

Before long, I was a full-on fan—an easy thing to be because that show, a darling of syndication, was on freakin’ all the time. But I didn’t go around telling people I watched it; my friends were all coked up on their Sex and the City and NYPD Blue. But most nights found me parked in front of the TV at 7:00 with a plate of burrito on my lap, tuning in to see what tangle Jessica would think her way out of this time.

Eventually I began to think of Murder, She Wrote as a self-contained universe with its own peculiar laws of physics. There, as sure as gravity, the loudmouthed bully always got whacked, the young hunk was accused but always found innocent, and the victim died tidily in the parlor, with a dribble of fake blood on a dress shirt.

But the real attraction became Jessica herself. She handled every twist and turn—every sexist police detective, every ill-mannered eyewitness—with grace, kindness, and aplomb. In a word, she was polite. And as the bodies fell around her and the widows grieved and the families schemed to get the money, her politeness was an anchor that everyone clung to—even me, balancing beans and rice on a fork and thinking about my own exasperating co-workers and family members. The lesson here seemed to be, Politeness may not cure everything, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

I still think of Jessica whenever someone’s rude to me, or when a friend needs a pep talk. I know that the reason she’s wise is because a roomful of writers made her up, but that’s nothing new. In its own way, Murder, She Wrote is like Aesop’s fables, or Greek mythology, or, one might argue, the Bible. They’re all just stories about how we (humans, gods, tortoises) should treat each other. And if the lesson is taught against a background of murder and mayhem, that’s nothing new, either. We humans have always taken the good with the bad, the sweet with the bloody. Such is literature. Such is life.

Poem: The Pasture on Sackett Road

If I chose to sit, I’d find

a bit of bare grass among

mines of manure flaking beige

under the sun, nowhere

to lean, the wire fence rusted

and slack, anything rigid

forbidden: no pails or rakes,

or let alone chairs. Horses

have a gift for entanglement.

At thirteen, my jeans

were filthy from hours

cross-legged on the ground,

passive in a land

of larger forces, fleck

of blue in a brown eye,

quake of flesh,

hocks and gaskins flexed

in everyday elegance,

a sweltering land

of sweet and grass

and the endless perambulations

of a dozen wise horses,

their tails the flags

of our small nation.

(appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, 2004)