Love Poem To My Dog

(Click above for an audio recording of my reading this poem.)

There is a place

Where I live, alone, yet with

Others so afflicted.

We straddle a torturous bypass we all

One day must make,

Never knowing

When we will fall into the decaying river of life,

When our exit.

In this way, yes, sudden, like a blood splayed

Car crash, or a hummingbird

Flying into the forest reflected in the window glass, at last.

But arriving, getting here,

Bound to this cliff, perched on this rock

— (Where are the sea nymphs,

To wail for me, as for Prometheus?) —

Has been a dripping away,

Like a slowly leaking faucet.

Years of laying waste, wasted

Decades of laying in one’s own coffin

Top ajar, coming and going, sometimes

Standing at the edge of the grave

With one’s friends and family, mourning,

The next moment levitating up and flying away

Like one of those women

Chagall painted.

Days blend into months,

Months into years.

One boundless joy,

My dog:

My dog’s woolly scent,

Come in from the rain,

Fragrant as honeysuckle.

My dog’s spirit, free,

Like the wild stormy sea.

My dog’s eyes, chestnut brown,

Like the fertile soil under which my spring lupines abound.

My dog’s body, like one of those plush hush puppy

White-combed sheep rugs

I begged my parents for,

Forty-five years ago,

Which I longed to crawl into,

And disappear.

My dog’s snout, soft as the back of a tufted titmouse,

My dog’s nose, dense chocolate, velvety black, leading the way,

Starlight in a moonless night.

My dog’s ears, upright, like downy turtledoves.

My dog’s paws…

Ah, how every lover of Dog

Adores the musty odor on the pads on their beloved’s feet, and

Should I bottle the scent of my dog’s paws, capture the smell of

Those moist scent pads

At the bottom of this Alaskan Malamute’s enormous paws,

I would be a famous woman.

Alas. My dog’s tail,

Once a gracious youthful flip of thick Malamute fur,

Now a naked hollow thump

On the wood floor.

       © Susan Lynn Gesmer, Love Poem To My Dog, 2003

Something you know well

            you could tell about it a hundred different ways.

            Holding tight in the night

            absentminded unretained unremembered

            she says no penises

            piercing penetrating my little girl body

            so it must not have happened.

            You think for days

            about her common elusive slipping away

            something just isn’t right

            almost parallel

            leaves beginning

            to change sea-water moss moving jade

            into champagne maize, terra cotta, meadow lark

            carnal amber of cool swaying elegance

            dancing to the sound of full-bodied voices

            calling down the spine to the root

            spreading. I am drinking you in

            the fine moisture of desire

            howling quaking exhilarating

            a heart yawning open and

            if I listen careful

            stirring spirits call out

            her name

            so what if the winds will come

            come cold and bitter tasting

            deep layers of snow from darkening concealing sheathed

            skies. Whirling bone white.

            My arms round you now

            our bodies warming

            outside freezing

            death cup temperatures

            us for a time away

            from their specific strategies for the

            agony, torment, harrowing torture

            of woman and all that is woman

            unbearable to witness like we do

            constantly live through each breath

            we take in and out.  You say “Bird,

            breathe deep, curl against, breathe with me,

            and squeeze my hand as hard as it hurts, okay?”

            And I try

            to keep it coming against all odds

            in the wake

            of constant disaster, dubious change

            my fantasies flipping like a beached porpoise

            back and forth. First

            their evil blood flooding the soil

            rich with new hope, then mine

            thin with so many years of aching.

            In all this hold forth.

            We tell each other

            arms are raised high in secret clandestine ceremonies

            it’s centripetal, some wolves still run free,

            and you’re here with flying feathered creatures like me

            flinging past strong seething branches while

            deer gather in far fields together.

Holding so delicate and sacred

            your large cupped hands

            round her bruised and broken featherbones

            because hunted deer have to leap clear

            and to attend to her

            you have to be in the right place

            at the right time

            with all things wild and dear

            circling.

                         ©  Susan Lynn Gesmer, Bird Watching, 1988

The night before you died

The owls stood above you, in the maple tree

Outside our bedroom window

Screeching, for hours

From their perches. You in your glistening soft white body

Dreamt deeply, your back legs knocked

And your nose twitched.

The night before you died,

I stayed up late sewing

Three ripped shirts, ripped for years, me mending,

Past midnight, as you, with pleasure,

Cooed in your dreams, innocent,

While the owls hooted.

One day when you were just a pup

And we were lying together

On the floor, paw in hand,

You told me,

Clear as the moon in a star-filled sky,

You were going to live to be sixteen.

I tried to convince many people,

Most thought me mad, and I,

Once again mistaking ego for wisdom.

Before our 13 years with you,

Who would have known the Alaskan Malamute’s

“I”, “me” was big as Paul Bunyan?

Your vets said you had a will of iron,

You were such an inspiration,

The dog who got the antibiotic to Nome, 500 miles through

Impassible wilderness, you, were such an inspiration to me, not to succumb,

Not to give up against the odds,

You were the dog who never stopped pulling, pushing,

In the end, dragging yourself around,

One legged. You would

Have kept on until you finally dropped

Dead in your tracks

This was how you wanted to die

How I wanted you to die, desperately wanted.

And you did keep on,

Until the day

I finally understood my decade of dreaming

You were locked inside a car in the sweltering summertime heat,

With no open windows,

And I was miles away, unable,

To reach you,

To save you.

The damned angel of death came for us, beloved pup,

Coyote trickster,

In a series of mishaps, miscalculations,

And a needle-happy veterinarian. My entire fault.

But we were so tired, so so tired, so

Even though I sometimes think I just might have as well shot you with my shotgun

As country folk have always done,

I can forgive myself,

Knowing a ventilator was going too far,

My beautiful old white dog.

Eyes like my father’s,

You convinced us both

You were never going to die.

What am I supposed to feel?

Betrayed by this ego of ours,

Now that your beautiful whiteness,

Fur thick as a sapling,

Eyes deep as a million millennia.

Locked together, our souls were, in embrace, as you died,

I had to watch you go, go away, away, to where I will never know.

Without I will forever be.

How am I supposed to go on?

My wolf-pawed dog,

Now that you are laying lifeless in the ground,

In the field, behind?

I am Without.

Without you.

My first dog.

You lived three months short of fifteen but still,

Without you is beyond

Anything we imagined, you and I,

Both flailing, failing, fragile but

It didn’t matter one iota

Because we were side by side, together in our

Infirmities. Aging as the falcon flies, woman and her dog.

 © Susan Lynn Gesmer. Dog Death: Without. 2011

1.

For the seabirds

Of Spectacle Island

Fear comes

With a shadow and seven- foot wing span,

White head, yellow beak

And six-inch talons.

For us

On earth’s island

Fear haunts in many guises

Endlessly reinventing itself

For each person

In the shadow of

Something long forgotten

Imprinted, cautioned,

Remembered from

A story told about what happened, once, in this

Or another long ago

Life.

For us on earth’s island

Fear comes with a shadow

On an x-ray or MRI

And a six-inch knife.

11.

Wizened wings warp ragged rocks,

A mad flurry of filigreed feathers below,

And 51 screaming seagulls levitate.

One heroine wailing in mad pursuit

Above the back of the eagle.

  ©   Susan Lynn Gesmer, The Eagle; Two Versions, 2011

~ To Kerry

1.

Dawn sun hasn’t yet risen

Arms stretched fawn like

This spring night

On my belly naked

Thighs spread

A foot resting by a leg.

Your body partially clothed

And it bruises easily

So carefully I attempt contact,

Knowingly, like ancient behooving elephants

In matriarchal sisterhood.

You pull me yonder woman

Though slowly I must move this time. Yes,

I want to dive and swim and gaily flap under the eddies,

But air is necessary for breathing

Tenacious creatures

Or I shall never again rise

Wet   dripping   like I do

Liquid brown eyes to you.

I could         Live      Forever     In your watery depths,

But without sun and light, I would be stripped down

To ivory bone and salted bitter-tasting flesh. We must

Have separate seas, you and me.

2.

I’ve never been here before, not like this.

You’re right

It’s the company I’m keeping

I am mountain and you the soil

Spread out over my granite,

You river and I the embankment soaking you into my sand,

I the journey   You ride me,

We are both wild rivers

As the full moon rises.

We both hear, when we are together, rumbling sounds

Like the plains quaking wide

Screeching hawks, falcons, free-falling from cliffs

Over moist vaginal valleys

Mingled with gathering crows

Calling doves

And full forests. Your

Heartbeat creating all this life.

And I know I have come

Finally

To the marriage of body and spirit.

Later with dawn

My arms around you holding,

If you hadn’t told me you seldom do this

I wouldn’t have guessed,

You rest

So soundly, sleeping, as I stroke you gently

And fiercely try

To love away some small portion of your past.

We are making of our loving a ritual,

I never expected this with you,

Possibility, awakened, quietly,

Foreseen only in dream

And unrelenting vision of what is possible.

3.

All around us, a war,

Because it wasn’t me

It was you raped, and I

Lament   There is no place safe   For long   In this world.

When we are together my love

All of this fades and

We need this sort of living too

It’s more than a want, it’s a right.

I long for you

Like I do for freedom

And I want to make it

Never again a sacrifice

Your body

With its endless expanse of land and sky.

©  Susan Lynn Gesmer, We Must Make Of Our Lives A Work Of Art, Revolving, 1988/2014

         I.

            She wobbled

            on unsteady feet

            from the thicket of spring wood

           trillium about to flower

            through fallen winter trees and once laden branches

            now covering the forest floor,

            toward the house

            on the ridge.

            When we woke

            she was sitting on the chestnut chair

            three feet from the door

            a ghostly visitor, eyes clouded

            head hanging low.

            There, then, she came

            quilled face to snarling snout

            before it dawned on us

           a wild animal

            at first glance, a porcupine

            was up on that chair

            as if perfectly natural

            she should be there

           softly rocking, head swaying,

            in her forlorn four-pawed anguish –

            awaiting her fate.

            II.

            Many hours later

            the raccoon lay in constraint

            anesthetic numbing her ache

            after the removal of seventy-five quills

            from tender tissues of tongue

            and inquisitive face.

            When we finally released her into the moonless night

            she had awakened enough from the sedative

            to pull towel off cage

            and begin to gnaw and claw

            at her enclosure with teeth that bite through bone,

            forefeet bearish and flat-footed,

            dexterous long fingers,

            and the sharpness of mind

            that can untie knots,

open doors,

            and release latches.

            III.

            I do not know when

          at last she wandered

            away into the night,

            for after free, she circled for hours

            round and round like the hawk she was not.

            Eventually I could no longer watch

           her slow coming

            past the blackberry bushes, lilacs and daffodils,

            ambling over the tender crocuses

            swinging in her gaited way by the rhododendron

            under the black walnut and yellow birch

            by the two vehicles in the drive, the wood pile, the mint patch

           the porch where her empty metal enclosure still sat,

            so afraid I was for her.

            Unsure if my attending was causing

            her erratic behavior

            I shut the light.

            IV.

            My spirit leaps at the still empty chair, when

            every morning now

           passing by I stare,

            half expecting to see the coon sitting there,

            head hanging low, small body swaying,

            the telltale sign of

            quills embedded every which way. But

            No longer really awaiting

            the aging brown-toothed female coon,

            I anticipate the feathered or furry face

            of a red fox, longtail weasel, bobcat,

            beaver having dragged herself up from the pond below,

           a ruffed grouse, barred owl, marsh hawk

            a little brown bat sitting there on that chair

            or even a bear

            imploring.

       © Susan Lynn Gesmer, Ode To An Old Raccoon, 2011

I see you everywhere I look this spring,

In the erect bone ivory-caked stamens of the tulips

Come back now three seasons,

Deep purple and buttercup yellow.

In the twittering of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird,

Six or sixteen of them, it is impossible to tell,

Zipping back and forth in territorial chase.

And of course, I see you in my father’s sister,

Lowered, last week,

In all her ninety-three years,

In a coffin, into the ground.

 

How many sit, will sit, want to sit

As I hear them,

Amongst tall grasses

In cemeteries,

Here and there, there and here,

On ladder-back chairs,

Discussing their lives with an audience of those who have not yet joined them?

Fi-bree, fi-bree, fi-bree,

Seeeriddip, seebrrr, seeeriddip, seebree

Weew… tiboo…wijik…Fi-bree

Fi-breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

 

The dead of humans, dead humans, death

In its wild simplicity

Is something else to birds

Who do not construct illusionary edifices to immortality.

 

This May, an angelic return, the gray-brown Eastern Phoebe

Once again in the porch rafters.

Perhaps last year’s bird, daughter of last year’s nesting phoebe

Or a granddaughter of the phoebe before her,

Sallying down or out to catch insects mid-air

From the perch of the laundry line,

Tail dipping and bobbing as she and husband take turns.

 

I like to think they go back three hundred years,

Eons of flycatchers here on this hill

Building anew what northern winter winds destroy. Year after year,

Over and over again, preparing intricate nests

On playhouse, sugarhouse, outhouse, lodge, teepee,

On sugar maples, oaks, yellow birches,

Which all stood, over time, where this house now stands.

 

Still, I am counting the dead and the days until

The black flies go back from whence they came,

Plump with deer blood, until

Dipterous mosquitoes,

For the tyrant flycatchers’ hatchlings

Once again fill the summer eve,

And May becomes June.

 

 

 

© Susan Gesmer, Mayflies: Another Conversation With Death

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I.

They are always together

The horses down the road

Two draft horses side by side, In their finite footed enclosure

Surrounded by field and forest.

Day after day
They are together,
The horses down the road,
They are there,
Across the way,
Enormous. Gallant. Galloping side by side. Heads tossing, Manes flying.

Nuzzling horses in love. Sometimes noses to the dirt
In vain pursuit of grasses,

They are infrequently separate,

The horses down the road.

When I drive by
At night or in stormy weather
And they are hidden from view in their stalls
Built into the end of a large old barn
With its stone foundation from the quarry up the hill,

I am startled by their absence.
Want to cry out
“These horses must never be parted.”

Every so often, there is only one horse standing

As if peering through a heavy snow falling
As the winds howl,
For sight or scent of one’s beloved,

Or, through a fog
Out to sea.
Or down a crevice which suddenly appeared
On the side of a mountain where one’s lover has disappeared

And one readies oneself
To leap down the mountain’s crevice
To run out into the howling blizzard
To run blindly through the fog
Jump off the edge of the cliff into the crashing waves

Because nothing else matters,
Life and death become but one and there is
Nothing else but reuniting with our beloved.

They appeared,
Last year,
These glorious beings
These Godlike beings
These beings more magnificent

Than anything man could ever create

Any edifice,

Any art,
Any architecture,

Anything of technology.

They are the place to me where the land meets the sea.

II.

One day, finally I park my car, dart across.

Although they don’t let on in any language we learned in school,

I know I am seen immediately.
I was seen in my car
On the other side of the highway.

I have been seen all of these past months,

Just as I have been seeing.

I wait patiently by the wood fence.

Cows graze a larger fenced perimeter.

Finally they come, slowly, appearing not to care

Trying to hide their curiosity.
The smaller horse in the lead
Funnels up, flank to me.

From five feet away now,
One watery brown eye, a horse eye,

Looks at me from another world.

I want to become a horse with these horses.
No matter how small the temporary confinement,
If I could be promised,
Assured to be with them, hoofed and standing in mud, tomorrow,

I would die today.

Happily leaving behind the folly of being human.

I would teach them
(As if they don’t know),
How to jump fences and

Galloping alongside,
Show them the long way to
The remaining few untamed forests,

Where our hair would grow thick and long.

As I stand there, jolted back to the world of flesh and bones, blood and lymph,

The horse, his head just a couple inches from mine,
Pulls up a top lip
To expose closed yellowing teeth.

I am not a horse person so I have no idea what this means
But I take it as a gesture of acceptance,
Slowly raising and tentatively moving my hand along the horse’s dusty neck

Huge as tree trunk
Reddish hair coarse and soft at the same time,
Muscle as hard as the earth upon which I stand.

I walk away with a fist full of gritty hair and time collapsed as
I see them in the aftermath,
Splayed on battlefield,

Generations of horses like
The horses down the road,
Once wild,
Captured, subdued,
Carrying men into battle,

Momentarily victorious atop

Their endlessly reinvented heights.

III.

Huge beautiful beings
The horses down the road
More beautiful than the earth and sky
Than the sea and stars,
The horses down the road
Standing in dirt and mud
Food and water from a steel bin, in the middle
Surrounded by an endless vista of grassy field, rushing stream

And nearby forest.

   

 ©  Susan Lynn Gesmer, The Horse Down The Road, 2011