There is a mystery, nature’s shadow, that haunts our relationship with our pets. So often they are the reservoirs of the love, pity and dreams of connection for which we are not allowed an outlet in our ordinary lives. The fierce intensity of this relationship is easy fodder for satire, but the utter strangeness of the attachment subverts easy criticism. There is something exceedingly human about our love for small, furry non-humans. Human beings use language, make art and keep pets. Go figure.

Karen Mulhallen is an old and dear friend. DG and his sons have stayed at the cottage in Irondale and the house on Markham Street. We knew Lucy (pictured with Karen in the accompanying photograph; NB dg’s dog is named Lucy, too) and Starlight and Dawn and Dusk, the whole menagerie and their successors. So these poems have a special, personal importance. Karen has published 16 books (and numerous articles), including anthologies, a travel-fiction memoir, poetry and criticism. She has edited more than 100 issues of Descant magazine. She is a Blake scholar and a professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. DG edited and wrote an introduction for her book of selected poems Acquainted With Absence. Her most recent collection, The Pillow Books, will be published by Black Moss Press this fall (see cover at the bottom of this post; see also three poems from this book published on NC in February).

The current poems published below are from an even newer book, Domestic Love, of which Karen writes: “It is about our relationship to domestic animals, cats dogs etc. The history of visual art is so rich in human interactions with their pets. And there are some wonderful prose and poetry books which also explore this. I thought, having written so many things which include pets it was time to devote an entire book to our relationship with these creatures with whom we are so privileged to share our lives.”

dg



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Poems from Domestic Love

By Karen Muhallen

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Irondale,

May on the Haliburton Road Number 23

No Exit

Carpet:

A fallen bird’s egg, broken blue

white stars of snow drops

masses of trilliums dog-toothed yellow

violets pendulous bells, the deep yellow fuzz of dandelions

moss, spikes and fur, acid green softness

violets deep

forget-me-knots

myrtle light

sky blue cumulus puffs

a few threads of cirrus

beaver pond a blue eye trees at far shore

waterlily pads in the morning gold

dried pods of rushes ellipse of pond

milk weed

verticals and horizontals of fallen trees

wind, hardwood

scrub with elder flower pods

white birch

lake caught from elevation

Road:

No Exit Road

hump, rise and fall and then fall no more.

Over the quiet a bird calls,

a plane leaves a stream a double wake,

alone on the lake one power boat

time and it passage

from light to dark.

The fox crosses as the sun rises from right to left

taking gold on his tale

Woman:

Six in the morning and no one on the lake,

gold spreads

shore approaches shore

bird calls and calls again,

chorus begins.

The birch tree is white, luminous white against the even

morning light which spreads

down the hill to the eastern shore.

Every sapling, every green branch

distinct.

Gold becomes greener, hill becomes

clearer, bird song

sweeter.

I lift my eyes to the hills whence

cometh my peace, comforts do increase,

gold moves off from shore becomes

dark mirror moves toward

the south. North becomes day

gold takes the lake, silver

birches spread their limbs, tall

white. Birdsong becomes even, continuous

No exit from Road 23.

The fox crosses down as the sun rises right to left

taking the gold on his tail

road and trees are dark, the black top smooth

then the city spires arise

on the road a small mound of dead fox.

One option, no exit,

out out brief candle.

Once there was a carpet,

..there was a road,

..there was a woman;

..and nobody loved as much as she,

..but me I loved him more…

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Spitz of the Cimelia

It was a misty early morning when the boy first saw the shadow

move from the stand of willows behind the burnt red of the

dogwoods near the pond’s edge across the grass toward his

bedroom window.



Not yet nine o’clock and not a school day and he blinked the sleep

from his eyes and looked again

but there was nothing there.



The mist never lifted that morning, the sky was an even light grey,

and the trees, black willows

arms stood dark but blurry in the density of the watery air.



All night the sound of the rain had entered his dreams,

and this morning there was still a drip drip drip from the trees

and the roofs of the farm buildings lying low on the land,



not far from the quaking bog.

The birds began their commotion despite the grey of the morning,

and one of the farm cats, a male, the large orange tabby



began to yowl near the back door.

All early winter they would leave their wet mittens

and soaked boots on the small side porch.



Gradually a boot or a mitten would disappear from the heap, and

throughout that early winter morning departures for school would

become moments of crisis, one child or another



hopping on mismatched footgear down the lane to the school bus.

He was only seven, going on eight, his brother was five and in

kindergarten, one older sister, only a year older,



and at home a little sister, a toddler.



One late spring day, when the day lilies were just in bloom, we

were out in the woods playing and stopped to eat our lunches,

peanut butter sandwiches. Out of the brush streaked a comet of

white fluff



and the sandwich was gone. He was ready.

After that we went to the woods to see him, and we always

took him his own lunch of peanut butter sandwiches.



And we were not afraid, though he was a wild dog.

A wolverine, perchance.

A good dog, as Beowulf might say.



As the bog flowers began to appear, pitchers opening to swallow

the first insects of summer, he led us deeper and deeper into the

woods and one day showed us his cache,



his cimelia

of all the lost boots and mittens.

He was aerialist, master of the woods and grasses,

leaping in the air to catch a field mouse,



all summer he was our companion in the woods and the vly

but each day with us he moved closer and closer to the house

and then he began to sleep out on the porch until winter came.



As cold deepened he moved inside

usually slept next to my bed, the lower bunk.

He would not be in the same room as my father,



nor any other person over six feet tall

even though my father fed him most of the time.

Table scraps, never dog food.



He refused dog food.



We were four, but he hung out with me most of the time

because I did the most things a feral dog would be interested in-—

woodsy things.



His name was Duffy, but I don’t remember how he got it.

He was a whitish spitz, sort of a cross between a Finnish spitz

and the yappy cotton candy dogs you see.



Canis pomeranus, according to Linnaeus, not nearly so big

as a Siberian husky, or one of those Asian Chow-Chows

but his tail curled up and he had a thick coat and small ears.



Spitze are wolves of course, but he never barked like a wolf.

And if he were in touch with his ancestors he wouldn’t say.

He did not like cats, but he was otherwise purely virtuous.



The quaking bogs were our playgrounds.

The one nearest to Oneonata is completely closed over by moss,

with no trees until you get right to the edge.



In the middle it’s like being on the sea on a huge underinflated

air mattress. Its border is all cattails, large sausage spikes rising up

nine feet, rushes with their rounded stems and small yellow



flowers. Thick mats of sedges in circular mounds moving out from

the shore of the bog, their sharp edges cut us as we played, and the

bulrushes protruded from the watery bits of the bog.



The part I didn’t tell is the one instance a dog ever talked to me.

I was ten, just about to turn eleven, and out by a stream

on our farm, the sky was a very deep blue above the cumulus



clouds but their bottom edges were slate grey and threatening,

suddenly I thought he was there with me, saying goodbye.

Though neither his presence nor his talking was finite



or organical, as Blake would say.

And I never saw nor heard of him again.

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Elegy for Starlight

Like a flight of geese you came through a February blizzard

A small black white and bronze mass of carapace

with bright blue eyes

I warmed you by the fire as they departed.

Home, home at last.

If I were to write the chronicle of your life

staving off the maw of Father Time

devouring always his young hostages to fortune

it would be to begin now, one year after your passing

while grief is fresh, but tears

have ceased, or so I would believe.

This morning the far western shore

replicates, duplicates itself

in the glass of water.

You are my Pangaea;

I your Gondwanaland.

And now to put an end

to all my journeying

open the window

let the warm love in.

This morning at last

the lake is glass on the far side

ripples nearby, light mist rising.

This Sunday morning

just before departure

the lake at last gave back

that quiet I had sought

the mist had gone;

it was now sheer glass

so smooth a passing motorboat

made scarce a mark or sound

to the west someone was gently

tapping, hanging perhaps a

picture of the mind or of the

thumbnail fawn toad

that hopped across my path

as I ascended to depart.

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A Delight of Pigs

Overcomes Household Stigma

Singularity being the Mark of Cain in human society,

the only solution is the acquisition of a household of warm fur

Markham Street Household of large-haired warm females

language not confined but defined by barking growling hissing

chattering whistling and cooing.

Steady diets of fish and organic vegetables for Miss Lucy.

Steady diets of organic greens, melons and good books

for all other inhabitants.

Collage being the ultimate post-modern art form, democratic

and encouraging of viewer participation invites you to enter

Markham Street interactive space and play with the pigs

Dawn and Dusk

who being toupees on eight feet are easily distinguished

by colouring, Dawn of course having an orange face

and her sister a puff of smoke as light falls.

To bury one’s face in a guinea pig’s back is to smell

a meadow of wild flowers on a warm summer day

The story of how Dawn and Dusk came to live in a corner

of the dining room will have to wait for another episode of

How the House Turns

but it should be stated that Dawn and Dusk, aka the Little Girls,

prefer the corner of the dining room to the great outdoors,

to their antique carved wood Rajasthan dovecote in the garden,

to the kitchen and the living room, and might

even prefer the dining room to the grasslands of Peru

where their ancestors roamed free and mucky

for most of their organic filled green grass lives.

For Dawn and Dusk, the fly in the proverbial ointment

is the giant: ‘Pssst, Sis here comes the Giant’.

The giant like the pigs is warm blooded with immense

circular green and yellow hands off which tumble lettuces, alfalfa sprouts, melons, green peppers, apples, sliced green grapes,

coriander, swiss chard, and in spring and in summer

the sweetest of fresh grasses, lemon balm and parsley.

Before Dawn and Dusk came to live in their two-storey palace condominium, it was the home of Starlight.

Starlight had blue eyes, huge testicles, and a little penis

which only appeared when his belly was gently pressed.

Starlight took tea regularly with the giant,

and the giant white fuzzy called Miss Lucy.

In the evening, he lay on the white sofa with the giants

and he smiled, and sometimes contently pooed and peed

on whomever he lay upon. The white sofa

was Starlight’s favourite corner of the universe

because it also came with a big book

which the giant of the large hands held up conveniently

for him to chew. His favourite book was The History of Reading,

though he also had a nibble on Through The Looking Glass Wood.

Alas, Starlight passed over, much to the sorrow

and the continuing depression of the giants,

but the chewed corner of his favourite book remains.

—Karen Mulhallen

See also “Solomon’s Judgement,” two poems on Carpaccio’s dog, and dg’s introduction to the selected poems—all published on NC.