The Sunday Poem: The Puppy Poem

I don’t really have any poems specifically for or about mothers, which is rather odd, come to think of it. But I do have this one, which is about parenting and marriage and of course, a puppy.

The Puppy Poem

She’s just teething now, the first
Puppy of our marriage — a black
Hound, glossy and bewildered.
And tonight, after my wife and I
Make love, I think about time
Because I can’t help it. We already
Know the dog won’t have her own puppies
If we can afford the operation,
And she’ll be dying when we finally
Have a small house we call home.
Just in time for us to get a new puppy
To teach our oldest about responsibility,
Just in time for our little girl
To learn about death, just when we
Will need reminding.
                              Think of
The bookish uses to which we put a dog:
The starveling mutt trotting on train tracks,
The plump lap dog on a silver chain,
The steady old hound who sits behind
The kitchen door and creaks
When she stands to greet the groceries…

Welcome to this marriage is what I want
To say to our puppy, but she
Is chewing on my shoes and doesn’t care
Because she is a dog and knows
The uses she is put to, and how things gnawed
To bits get thrown away without a marker
Once they are done with their parenting.

Looks like this dates to around March of 1994. We had indeed just acquired Mika, said puppy. We did not have any kids yet. Mika died in a house fire years ago, just in time to teach Elena about death. Today, Elena has a stuffed animal black Labrador named Mika, and wants another dog. We keep telling the kids that if we get a dog, they’ll have to learn to pick stuff up, because otherwise all their toys will get chewed.

As I recall, the workshop disliked this poem, saying that it was arrogant and clueless about actual parenting to claim that a dog did parenting. All I could think at the time was that these were clearly not dog people; later, when we did have kids, this was just confirmed in my mind. Mika watched over Elena, slept under her crib… just as I am told my childhood dogs did for me. A familiar story, of course, the way in which symbols like dogs fall into convenient categories, the way in which certain sorts of family things become stories passed down and repeated with the generations.

Of course, the poem isn’t only about dogs, really. It’s about people and things too. The shoes are parenting the dog, and to some degree used up in that process, even though they might also have a splendid career as footwear on the side. The dog is used up in the process of parenting the baby. The parents themselves are used up in the process of parenting the children. At some point, all of these childhood props are set aside, so that you can take on the role of being a childhood prop yourself. The chain of life.