The Old Dog

It was one of the coldest winters, yet the old dog never showed up at the kitchen door like he used to, whimpering to be let in for warmth and food. Where he spent his nights, or how he got his food, we could only guess. Even his paw tracks in fresh or deep snow were missing. Then, on a warm spring day, when red-tail hawks circle the sky with hungry eyes, while walking in a field newly greened, there, in the distance, I saw a flurrie of bickering crows. Closer, I saw why– it was the old dog on his side, his ribs protrubing through emaciated skin sagging over the emerging skeleton, his underbelly gutted, all but scoured out, only vestiges of internal organs remaining. A savage hunger had clawed its way into the old dog. Fecal matter had spilled into the open cavity, his head and face sunk into the thawed earth as on a pillow, the mouth barely opened revealing gaps where teeth once grew, the tongue chewed out. Around his carcass a vigorous, vibrant ring of lush grass feeding off its remaining bodily fluids. Crows loved carrion, they would make a meal of him, competing for choice pieces of putrid flesh, his bones picked clean. Other creatures, drawn by the smell, would carry off the carcass – a fox or gray wolf, even a leashless neighborhood dog. And what for years had been the old familiar dog, was no more. In this poem, I have brought the old dog back to life, rescued him like a shadow from my ever diminishing memory and with words restored him to flesh and blood. And every time this poem is read, the old dog will live again, and others will come to know him as I did. Yet human memory is no more permanent than words or freak April snow. For I, too, must lie down in that ever approaching field, where no light is, no new grass, no blue sky, or red-tail hawk – only the silence of something like an endless existence we struggle to understand. And who’s to say who really has been spared?