For One Shot Wednesday and As New Challenge for All Comers....

Posting for One Shot Wednesday, a poem inspired by Tess Gallagher's Not a Sparrow which you may read by clicking on the link.  If you wish to take the challenge of basing a new poem in Ms. Gallagher's piece, please let me know; I'll choose a few to post on this blog next week.

Here's my poem:

Love in Advent

I thought I would rest there awhile

Next to the slowed winter creek,

My arm over his back,

The old sprigged

Comforter over us both

It was Advent and I must have heard

The Good News on the radio

“We shall all be changed”

I whispered to him,

Curling against his still, great

And cooling body.

It was quiet in the frosty shallows

And the snow sweetly fell

Over autumn’s smaller tragedies—

The beaver skeleton I’d found

With an arrow through its ribcage

The small bones of that which flies

Or falters, picked clean

Short months earlier

The great-hearted golden dog

Now lying against me

Had trumped the judge’s

“One last time around please”

For a Best in Show

And a feather in my cap.

Then one day, unattended

He’d busied himself

Grinding a small fiberglass fence

To shards

That when I found him weak,

Wincing, he threw up with rank water

I’d taken him in where they opened him up

And rebuilt him from the inside out

Three feet of intestine sutured every

Three or four inches.

They warned me these might not hold

And so it was that before first light

I was first to the vet’s place 
through the back door

My flashlight into that darkness

Where, great head on his paws

He had slipped away.

I loaded him into the back of the truck

And took him home

Skidding over frozen crabapples,

Opened the tail gate not seeing

The wheels had slipped over the incline

And he rolled out, knocking me down

So that we fell to the water’s edge

And I wrapped us in our shroud

I thought we should sleep on

Together

In the sanctifying, debriding cold

But then he to whom I have turned

All the years

Came, in his coveralls

His Farmall cap

Shovel in one glove;

I went back to the house

And ground coffee beans

To a fine, useless powder.

When he called to me

We walked down to the apple tree

Where he had taken care

Shovel full of loam by shovelful

To return love's body

To the earth.

I had not seen him weep before

But we did then as one,

Holding hands

Lingering there

On behalf of our dog

And our brother, Death

This is the cold dance

It has asked of us

Do you see how nothing less

Could bind you two

Together?

Turn up love’s flame,

Turn, and burn on.

Head back now,  

Through the apple blossom snow.

Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2010

All rights reserved.