Two dogs cross the street to say hello and trigger me,
leaving their owners on the curb
to sniff one another’s gossip, and one pooch is holding
onto what appears to be a child’s winter boot,
which I’m presuming it found somewhere
on the side of the road after all the snow melt,
and violently forced into its maw.
I’m reminded of our springer’s Max and Katie,
who, every day after school would stand
on their hind legs to look
out the mudroom window for us kids
as we arrived home from school,
or for our parents to get home from work.
From a distance they seemed like overeager children
waiting for Santa to show up,
their brown and white heads
appearing and disappearing, each one shooting up,
one after another,
the sound of their digging at the door casing
to try to get out and see the ones
baring rows of bone-shaped treats.
One year, when I was 14
my father took Max and I out to shoot his new pistol
in the woods behind the house.
He’d found the perfect tree
and when he shot his
Dan Wesson 357 Maximum into it,
faster than any other bullet, he said,
Max took off and lost us for a half an hour.
The sound must of practically torn off his
hypersensitive dog ears,
and the rest of his tiny tank-like body
must have ricocheted off into space
just as swiftly as his hearing and that bullet did.
When we found him in some bushes
on a side of a ravine you could barely walk on,
he cowered toward us, then cowered away from us,
toward us, away from us,
until finally he found our welcoming legs
and looked up at us
the way a young child looks up at you at a funeral
with its big watery eyes.
I remember the tree we shot the bullet into,
how the entry hole going in
was so much smaller than the exit hole coming out.
I remember the length of the barrel,
which reminded me of Pinocchio’s foot-long nose
after a stint of lying,
and I remember the downward kick
my father’s revolver gave me
when I tried to shoot an abandoned car in the woods
from fifty feet away
and only ended up shooting the dirt on the ground
not three feet in front of me,
remember too how I thought
how swiftly things can get away from you in this life
it’s a miracle we’re not all hiding in the dark
waiting for home to return to us,
or digging our own graves as soon as we can talk,
to prepare for all our short-sighted miscalculating.
On the walk back to the house we passed the brook
and watched a beaver slap its tail and shoot
back into its lodge,
stopped at a fishing hole to marvel at the possibility
of trout lying just under an overhang,
waiting for the water temperature to drop
so that they would feel cool enough to feed,
and I thought about shooting my father’s gun
and how it wasn’t really all that fun,
certainly not as fun as my father’s widening,
whiskey-shooting smile seemed to say it was.
That was the day I decided I didn’t like guns,
though I grew up watching my father clean his
and talk about how rare each of them were.
Before he drank himself to a heart attack,
he told me he never liked killing things,
or hunting alongside his friends,
and that when he went he just wanted to be with them,
but that he did like target shooting,
and the awesome power each instrument made him feel.
But I think he really just liked to scare the ever-loving,
caring and fatherly man and husband he was
and didn’t want to be, away for a while,
preferring to view his own life
down an unnecessarily long barrel of
a dream of being hard and dangerous,
the child inside him he was afraid to love most
could never admit to fast and direct enough
when he was young.
“It’s really something isn’t it?” he said,
admiring the pistol one last time
before we exited the wood line,
and I remember Max rushing behind me
as my father held it up to our downcast eyes,
our bodies silently pulling back
and beginning to arch over their own skeletal cages,
as if submitting to a tyrant, beneath steep-sloping
giants of click-clacking scotch pine and maple.
I wrote this poem after walking to work and seeing two dogs being walked. While writing, it naturally digressed to a second subject of my own dogs from childhood, and to the third more unexpected and necessary subject of my father’s fixation on his guns, and how he sometimes used his love for them to shoot fear into those he confused for an abused pet, demanding a more penetrative love from them, lest an unnatural and almost werewolf-like harm he couldn’t stop would come for them.