Dog Poems by Wesley McNair

The One Who Will Save You

If some afternoon you
should pass by there,
and the woman comes out swooping
her blue bathrobe back
from her path and crying, “Baby, oh my
sweet baby,” it won’t be you
she means, nor you
the hubby wearing motorcycles
on his T-shirt and jumping
down from the stairless
sliding glass door
says he wants to kill, so just
stand still. It’s the dog
they’ll be after, the shadow
under the not-quite sunk pink
Chevy, ratcheting itself up
with a slow, almost inaudible
growl into the biggest, ugliest
shepherd-Labrador-husky
cross West Central Maine
has ever seen. It won’t matter
if the two shirtless fat kids
come from around back with
hubcaps on their heads and shout
even louder than their father does,
“Queenie!” By then Queenie,
less a queen than a chain-
saw lunging at the potential
cordwood of your legs,
won’t know or care what
humans have named her. There’ll be
no hope for you, Pal, unless,
that is, the teenage daughter,
who comes across the front lawn’s
dandelions in her tank top
every so often to set me free,
releases you, too – shaking her head
as if only you and she
could see how impossible
her stupid parents and this uncool
dog really are, and lifting it,
like that, by the collar
to create a bug-eyed
sausage that gasps
so loud her mother gasps – not
that the daughter will care. “Mother,”
she’ll say, eyeing the sorry choice
of afternoon attire, “you should see
how you look.” Then, flicking
Dad out of the way
and renaming the creature
she’s created “Peckerwood,”
she’ll march as if she
herself were now queen
back through that kingdom
of California raisins and tires
and Christmas lights decking the front
porch in July, and past the screen door
with the sign saying This
Is Not A Door, to disappear,
rump by rump with a bump
and a grind to you,
through the real screen door.

****

Sleep

The young dog would like to know
why we sit so long in one place
intent on a box that makes the same
noises and has no smell whatever.
Get out! Get out! we tell him
when he asks us by licking the back
of our hand, which has small hairs,
almost like his. Other times he finds us
motionless with papers in our lap,
or at a desk looking into a humming
square of light. Soon the dog understands
we are not looking, exactly, but sleeping
with our eyes open, then goes to sleep
himself. Is it us he cries out to,
moving his legs somewhere beyond
the rooms where we spend our lives?
We don’t think to ask, upset
as we are in the end with the dog,
who has begun throwing the old,
shabby coat of himself down on every
floor or rug in the apartment, sleep,
we say, all that damn dog does is sleep.

****

Charles by Accident

Named Charlie for the relaxed
companionship we expected,
he became Charles for his butler-like
obedience, though he went off-duty

the morning my wife walked back
from the mailbox watching him
toss what looked like a red sock
gloriously into the air,

seeing it was actually the cardinal
she had been feeding all winter.
Why did she scream like that
was the question his whole,

horrified body seemed to ask, just
before he disappeared, back soon
at the door, black coat, white collar,
all ready to serve us: who was

that other dog, anyway? Who,
on the other hand, was this one,
chosen at the pound for his breed
and small size, now grown into three

or four different kinds of large
dogs stuck together. It wasn’t his fault,
of course, that in the end he wasn’t
Charlie, or even, considering the way

he barked at guests and sniffed them,
Charles exactly. Besides, it couldn’t
have been easy to be whatever
sort of dog he was. Part retriever,

he spent his winters biting ice,
and summers dirt out of his tufted paws.
Part Collie, all he ever got to herd
were two faux sheep: a wire-haired terrier

that bit him back and a cat that turned
and ran up trees. An accidental sheep-dog,
Charles by accident, and our dog only
after he’d been disowned, he understood

that life is all missed connections
and Plan B — the reason why, perhaps,
no one could quite pat him or say
good boy enough, and why sometimes,

asleep, he mourned, working his legs
as if running to a place he could never
reach, beyond Charles or any other
way we could think of to call him.

****

Not a dog poem, but still…:

The 1950s

“Let’s take the car after school,” the two girls
would say, which meant they wanted to be taken
by it, the top down, the wind surfing over
the wrap-around window. The stepdaughter,

Carol, always drove, just as her new stepfather
insisted, and while her girlfriend Debbie listened
for the lighter to pop out from the dash
and with its tiny, interior hotplate lit menthol

cigarettes one by one for both of them, they thought
about how the boys would admire them.
When they drove into their station at the A&W
and Carol unhooked the mic to order their Cokes

pushing back her shoulder-length hair to reveal
her long throat, she thought she resembled
a popular singer. “Beautiful,” was the word
the boys used to describe the car as they gathered

around it, stroking its curves and sometimes
asking if they could see what was under
the hood. Then they looked into Carol’s amazing
and frightening blue eyes, or Debbie’s warm,

compliant ones, the door or fender giving them a way
to steady themselves. All of that was OK
with the stepfather, who only required that they let
no boys inside, or they could never borrow

the car again. Handsome like a man, he really wasn’t
much more than a boy himself and, not wanting to be
anyone’s father, told them to call him “Petey.”
As he said goodbye in his T-shirt some afternoons,

leaning comfortably into the open window of his new
Chevy convertible, he would call Debbie
“Ginger Snap,” and his stepdaughter, his favorite,
with a knowing wink, “Angel Pie.” He was proud

of the sinuous Hawaiian woman in green he wore
on his muscular forearm and the darker tattoo
in cursive letters of his own name underneath, the same
tattoo he had his new wife ink on the inside

of her ankle. “Don’t you go changing on me,”
he would say with a smile before they headed out
the driveway and the motion rose in their ears, but
the two in the car were already changing, Debbie,

who hoped each day at the A&W for a certain
cute boy to return her gaze, and Carol, in distress
because she couldn’t quite get the muscular forearm
and the wink out of her mind even after she touched

her cigarette to the lighter and took a deep drag
and tried to find a good station on the radio.