–For Tika
No one wants to read a poem about dead pets,
a dog scratching its way to a fresh dug hole,
its throat punctured, its heart and thorax crushed.
No one knows why the magic leaves the mind,
why words stop forming to end a rhyme,
how images fade into cloud-work and night skies.
The shovel is thick and sharp, the earth soft from rain,
the weeds and grass gone under the feet of more dogs,
the fence sturdy as bone, sturdy as movement in muscle.
One grave already bears witness to the violence of nature,
another to the ignorance of us as we eat into the ground
developing and building and tearing down
what we need to live out our lives in comfort.
No one wants to read a poem about a dead dog. Pets die.
We bury them. Then we wash our hands and eat.
| Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
For me, the poem conveys the narrator’s (the poet Michael H. Brownstein’s) chagrin at the loss of his dog Tika. Chagrin too, perhaps, at the reminder of the burial hole awaiting himself, or the wind, if someone scatters his ashes. I felt the chagrin myself, the last time my wife and I were in Chapel Hill and passed Memorial Grove on the UNC campus and I imagined my daughter and my son someday depositing my own ashes, and their mother’s.
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