Canine
My friend’s husband had always
been a man meager with his words.
Within ten minutes he parceled out
the ones he needed.
The last of the golden retrievers
they liked to keep—whose names
I never could remember—
hugged the floor between us.
Without thinking, I reached down
in the stilted silence to feel the comfort
of its coat, and the retriever rose
and nosed her head onto my knee.
I scratched behind her ears. She snuggled in.
I cupped her face and said,
pretending to be a dog person:
You miss Aleta, too. We were looking
into the black center of each other’s eyes
when a sound sirened out of her—
from somewhere dark and deeper
than I ever thought a dog went.
It carried on and on, that sound,
the same moaning wail that,
five years later, still sticks
in the back of my throat.
been a man meager with his words.
Within ten minutes he parceled out
the ones he needed.
The last of the golden retrievers
they liked to keep—whose names
I never could remember—
hugged the floor between us.
Without thinking, I reached down
in the stilted silence to feel the comfort
of its coat, and the retriever rose
and nosed her head onto my knee.
I scratched behind her ears. She snuggled in.
I cupped her face and said,
pretending to be a dog person:
You miss Aleta, too. We were looking
into the black center of each other’s eyes
when a sound sirened out of her—
from somewhere dark and deeper
than I ever thought a dog went.
It carried on and on, that sound,
the same moaning wail that,
five years later, still sticks
in the back of my throat.
Susan Cohen’s second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the David Martinson—Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and was a runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review 25th Anniversary Anthology, the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Poet Lore. Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and the Southern Review. She has an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Berkeley, California.
Art: Creative Commons