Throwing Dogs

It is not polite to throw dogs
but I tell you the mutt was hit
by the Greyhound leaving me
standing there come home.
Tail wagging as if, "Great, here at last."
She ran onto the bridge, whack, thud
stupid dog.
Spasms, blood spurting
shit, happens, what a mess.
Yelping, broken back
crushed head
an eyeball swinging out
canine teeth scattered.
So I picked Daisy up by the back of the neck
tail, scruff and ran to rail,
heaved my remembrance
over into the frigid river --
quicker gone forever.
Like I say, it is not polite
throwing dogs.

Go 05-25-02


Friday I pick up Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room, on the
way home, along w/ a bio of Edward Dorn (unhappy to discover a hero died
in '99) and Vollmann's Rainbow Stories (I'm irritated that the younger
Vollman attended Deep Springs -- I applied two years in a row to attend
the cattle ranch prep school with 25 students on a vague spot north of
Death Valley -- then he went Cornell summa cum laude in comparative
literature, like GIANT SHADOW making me feel totally neutered by life.
When interviewed for Deep Springs I was asked what I thought of the
school of working poets. I was confused because I did not realize there
were any unworking poets.) Friday driving home on the LIE for two hours
I'm satisfied I did good damage for the week, damage being how I
envision work. Cursing the amateur drivers in their Jaguars & Land
Rovers that keep getting into my path in unexpected manners. I find
myself increasingly irritated at the thought that Billy Collins may
never have thrown a dog. Like I should know. When I arrive in the house
I'm told that Kathy in Atlanta, Georgia got her car rear ended and I
find Tarzan, baby hedgehog, dead. I'd been nursing Tarzan for the last
week and feeding her baby chicken food from an eyedropper. When I lived
at Warm Springs, Oregon (a penchant for watery places) we had a litter
of dogs that got dysentry and being remote from veteranarians and
undesirably poor we endured them dying off one by one. Then one morning
I was walking down the basement stairs in the dark and stepped on the
head of one of the black haired pups and killed it. Nothing to say that
I felt really bad and the owner of the dogs was a bit peeved. I never
did throw a dog off of a bridge. In the same town I was walking across
the bridge going from the reservation to the white liquour store when a
cat followed me that was hit by a bus. The poor thing was flipping
around in the air spurting blood and I did throw it off the bridge into
the river with an intention of mercy to drown into numbness in the cold
water. The mountain water was damned cold. I did have a dog that was
killed by a Greyhound and that I buried under a rock. I was crying the
whole time. Billy Collins, in my mind, fixates on dogs and vision, and
I'm reminded of the time our best friend Monster, lab shepherd mix, got
in a fight with an unpleasant shepherd and got his eyeball burst. I'll
never forget seeing that. Dogs have metaphoric resonance as identifiers
of our human existence though mostly it is values that we apply to their
habits of devotion. Ulysses gets home to Ithaca, my home, and his dog
knows him. Problem is none of us ever gets home, and when we think that
we have returned to some place where we have been it is an illusion.
Scattered teeth are seeds of rebirth and in this poem, for me at least,
indicate that though we imagine that we throw off illusion it comes
around us again in another form. I see Billy Collins as a metaphysical poet.

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