Skip to main content

Wrong Dog


He is small, but mighty,
and his might comes,
not by reason of muscular genes,
but by hard training
and dedication.

Cooper protects us
from whatever other threat
should come leashed
down the street.

Most of the dogs in our neighborhood
are good-natured critters, perfectly willing
to share the road with whatever comes by,
but Cooper considers them all to be intruders.
Truth be told, it is almost a problem:
whatever the size of the dog-come-ambling.
Cooper springs at him, stopped only by his leash
and the frantic pleas of his new owner-walkers
that he be a good dog.

But Cooper is afraid of nothing,
no threat, no useless peacenik
wanting only to sniff along the roadside,
and at whatever dog comes along.
Cooper sleeps on a tiger,
quite as if the tiger represented
no threat, at all.  So when
Cooper hits the street,
he is not cowed by . . . oh,
Bowser-the-Schnauzer,
for instance, twice his size
and four-times his amiability.

Once beyond the Shock and Awe of his initial charge,
Cooper is perfectly happy to sniff without shame,
and to trot alongside his former, mortal enemies.
Mari and I are uneasy,
apologetic, even,
anxious for detente.
We cannot rid ourselves of the tiger, since the tiger belongs to Jao,
and Cooper is not interested in training on a pussy cat or bunny,
which might temper his bluster and bravado.

I wonder about a wall
down the middle of the road,
but the City will not permit it,
nor are the neighbors willing
to pay for it, so an irrational
national solution will not work
here, either.  And after all,
Cooper is half-Chihuahua.
The mini-Doberman in him
is unreconciled to himself.

But I am drifting off into politics:  wrong dog.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more