I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life -- Mary Oliver

[cynical_sweater]

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

----

We had to put my dog to sleep this morning, so I'm having a hard time today. :[ If anyone has poems about pets (specifically dogs, but any pet will do),

Comments

[tree]

these are quite sad, so might not be what you're looking for.

Dog

For how many days had the dog shaken?
She'd shaken and shaken, standing
hunched, unable to walk or lie,

until exhaustion overtook her,
and pivoting on one leg she folded down-
shaking, shaking-and did not sleep

even on the last night or the next morning,
when he gathered her into his arms carefully
and she wheezed as though

the weight of her so borne
were a lack to the ribs.
And she drooled onto his sleeve

then lay in the sun
where he placed her looking up,
her half-hairless tail a faint pulse of approval,

as he raised the rifle
and placed the bead in the notch
of the sight,

on the slope of her slant forehead
and then among the mottled cowlicks
of the coat across her chest-

and she died,
was gone like that,
the bullet still chambered in its shell,
his finger barely nestled to the smooth curl

of the rifle's brass trigger,
so intent on his awful chore
he might not have noticed the stillness at all

if the shaking-for how many days
had it been?-if the shaking had not been
the very motion taken by life itself in her,

another being that blood by blood
moved through his own brotherly bones
like rain or sap,

through the billion suckling mouths
his digging exposed
and to which he fed her,

saying over her grave the single word
she had come to know herself by,
never understanding it was no name at all.

Robert Wrigley

.

Fetch

Nothing is ever too hard for a dog,
all big dumb happiness and effort.
This one keeps swimming out into the
icy water for a stick,
he'd do it all day and all night
if you'd throw it that long,
he'd do it till it killed him, then he'd die
dripping and shining, a black waterfall,
the soggy broken stick still clenched
in his doggy teeth,

and watching him you want to cry
for all the wanting you've forsworn,
and how, when he hits deeper water,
his body surges suddenly, as if to say
Nothing could stop me now --
while you're still thinking everything
you've ever loved
meant giving up some other thing you loved,
your hand, the stick stuck in the air,
in the shining air.

Ruth L. Schwartz