Since it is mid-January, pouring rain, and I find myself writing about dogs as familiars and about their inevitable loss, I begin with a refrain from “Dog Dreams,” a sardonic song by Jonatha Brooke for her album Grace in Gravity with the Story. I tend not to command, scold, or restrain my dogs, but my dogs have been generally well-behaved, if sometimes a pain. The refrain:
Dog Dreams, Dog Dreams
Please don’t wake us up!
No bad dog, No stay,
No basement, No way,
No choke chain, No dry food,
No fetch game, No, No, No
No bad dog, No stay,
No basement, No way,
No choke chain, No dry food,
No sit, lie down, roll over, SHAME
As we headed towards the solstice this year, the days were especially dark. It was hard to find peace of mind, and I wanted more than usual just to get away. The just-finished semester of teaching had left me feeling word-bled. What I wanted most was to be absorbed into unmediated experience, the way I am on a long walk with a dog. Our family dog is now eighteen years old and so sustained by our daily rituals that I am uneasy leaving her.
The smallish white terrier I am caring for is lighthearted, the only dog I’ve ever seen noticing stars, calculating the unbridgeable distance, accepting that they cannot be caught or cornered. It seems incongruous that Tally has grown old, can no longer run with me, can no longer even see the stars.
For those of us who engage with our pets as familiars, our connection loosens the bindings that words impose on perception. Our familiars are spirit guides and seem sent intentionally to us. Poet/painter Desiree Alvarez’s enormous, exotic rescue was such a dog. Soon after Bingo died, Desiree, Catherine Woodard, and I took a dog-less hike to a rocky plateau on Hook Mountain that Catherine had christened the Bingo Bowl, since we could pour water for the dogs into a stone hollow there, and read Desiree’s poem “Familiar” as a farewell.
Familiar
All day digging the hole,
then later lowering your body, still
warm with sun and heart,
wanting to join you down
deep in the earth’s brown pelt.
I dug you the most beautiful hole
filled with forsythia.
When grandpa’s old wood shovel broke
I got down to scoop the field dirt,
rocks, tear out the roots
while you watched. You, the long
walk up the slate mountain,
the swim across the high March river.
We lived large, every day of sautéed
butter and salt. You ran away
so many times in your wildness.
Always I got you back. I swear
that was you I saw when I drove
back to the city, coyote shimmering
by the roadside staring straight at me.
It rained as I made a ring of stones
on top of your grave, and the wind
blew a hole right through me
in the shape of a dog running
on my first night without you.
Desiree Alvarez
I admire the unsentimental truth of “Familiar.” The dog provides companionship as her mistress digs the grave, understanding only that it is a profound endeavor. The speaker’s carefully described process of digging contains her grief and frustration. The dog is alive in the exhilarating activities of long, shared experience. The coyote by the roadside is both real and a messenger between worlds. Finally, the loss is realized in the compelling image of the hole blown through the speaker “in the shape of a dog running.” There is nothing here that is not true and necessary.
Familiars free us by giving access to what isn’t already bound up and marked off in words. Small wonder that the New England Puritans, so protective of boundaries, accused witches of projecting themselves into forbidden territory in the guise of familiars. This excerpt from W.S. Merwin’s “The Paw” from The Carriers of Ladders (2003) captures this merging and freeing of spirits in a poem about a favorite dog returning in a dream:
from THE PAW
I return to my limbs with the first
gray light
and here is the gray paw under my hand
the she-wolf Perdita
has come back
to sleep beside me
her spine pressed knuckle to knuckle
down my front
her ears lying against my ribs
on the left side where the heart beats […]
we are coursing the black sierra once more
in the starlight […]
The ellipsis is mine. The poem ends with the speaker waking, the final line, “but we are gone.” We.
I am grateful to Desiree Alvarez, winner of the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, for her permission to include “Familiar,” which will appear in Devil’s Paintbrush forthcoming from Bauhan Publishing during Poetry Month, April 2016.
“Dog Dreams” was written and arranged by Jonatha Brooke (Dog Dream Music/ASCAP) for the Story’s 1991 album Grace in Gravity. Here is a link: Dog Dreams
I excerpted W.S. Merwin’s “The Paw” from Doggerel: Poems about Dogs, edited by Carmela Ciuraru for Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets