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

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

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more