1

What Dog A Small Book for Gus

by Katie Booms Assarian

2

A Dedication

My dog was taken from me.

Or— I should say

I left him behind.

Because he was not mine.

In the strict facts of things.

Or the loose ones.

Though I loved him.

-with special love for Gus and his people

3

What to do when

you have naively agreed to dog-sit

a trained hunting dog?

And his owners have left.

4

He is your dog roommate,

very cute, from a slight distance,

and it seemed like a great idea

to keep you company

on spring break.

Gus.

5

You take him to the park

(he drags you to the park).

Where he catches his first airborne bird.

Snatches it down from the wide blue sky.

Only moments after you had explained

to two small, blonde brothers

that Gus couldn’t do Frisbee with them

because he likes to play catch rough,

without bringing the Frisbee back.

Luckily, they are looking away.

6

You try to clean up the bird,

when you can get it from him,

but you can’t bring it to yourself

to touch it.

It is not going to fit in the poop scoop bag.

7

This is not the first time you have agreed

to dog-sit. Or the last time you will.

But, it is the time you realize

he is officially a fully grown dog.

No longer your sweet, sleepy puppy.

(While you have the same arm muscles.)

Somehow you'd missed that.

8

Walking this dog

really is more like being walked.

Or being run,

more accurately,

through your own neighborhood

faster than you've ever gone.

9

While, out of the bushes,

at every turn,

comes some moment

of beauty

you'd like to stay in:

the three football players,

of widely different ages,

in full uniform for no apparent reason,

the woman watering her flowers

in a mint green bathrobe

while her radio plays Kafka’s

“The Metamorphosis”

(the part where Gregor Samsa

has fully become a cockroach

but can’t yet understand

why his family doesn’t recognize him)

10

With this dog,

you get at most

five minutes

on any pursuit

that is not also

his pursuit.

11

He also attracts

excitement. Wonder.

Teenaged and tiny

fan clubs.

12

He is all spindly legs,

whirling,

and amber eyes,

drawing us suckers in.

13

Blessedly, his main-squeeze humans

come back.

14

But no one can even say the word 'bird'

in the house after that,

not in casual conversation,

unless there's a bird wing ready

in the freezer

that we can hide immediately

for him to find.

He is inconsolable, else.

15

We can't leave anything out

with less defenses

than a closed freezer door,

or he'll eat it. Whether it's food or not.

So we watch ourselves,

change all our habits.

16

17

We humans want to train him

to do our hunting, but his instincts

outdo us every time.

18

He leaps

over the kitchen table,

set for a birthday party,

and lands on the other side

with a cupcake in mouth.

19

To Gus,

most any hunt

is worth traffic

and tracks of claws.

Never mind human vagaries.

20

He will chase a bear cub

and run at a moose

and go like mad for the river

in his shock collar,

just making me twitch

to use it:

he ignores all signals

so long

if you are at all

half-hearted.

21

He does not go

after the second

porcupine, but

who knows:

the third?

22

He is a thin, deepest brown

streak of lightning.

23

We still don't know

how he reached above the fridge

to find the fresh bread,

unless he flies

and has never let on.

24

25

What hunter, what guard, this dog.

What insistence.

26

What makes him choose who

to raise his muzzle to and bark?

Who to accept?

27

Out of all the people walking

the sidewalk past the porch,

a dozen in the last hour,

what makes him pick just one

to howl at:

the, possibly, homeless man,

who answers, “Thanks, dog.”

28

Who among us can bear

to be made to feel unwelcome?

29

This human loneliness

is why

I have turned to dogs.

This is why I trust in Gus.

30

(The smart boy, with a memory for scent

as long as a poet's nostalgia.)

31

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Gus has favorite people

throughout Laramie:

at the coffee shop,

on the Greenbelt,

where’s he’s snuck into

several university buildings.

A dog auntie,

I work to be one of the favorites.

33

We lucky people get

special gifts: such as

he lets us make his ears

into wings.

34

He likes to be lifted up

by the folds of loose skin

of his long, straight back,

like a dog helicopter,

Planetary dog,

or a kitten scruffed by its mother,

Lifted and set down somewhere else.

Sky dog.

35

He plays around the house

as loudly as he can

to show us his joy

and make one of us catch it.

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What must he think, all day,

this bandy-legged creature

who doesn’t speak (we think)

our language,

but lives fully in our houses,

trashing them in search of…? ,

waiting for us to come home

38

Waiting for us to let him out

where we’ve been.

39

What is behind those eyes

that can change so much

between droop to delight?

What defaults to sadness,

or the look of it?

40

(Is this why he always finds the garbage

when we're gone?

Needing to follow scent to … ,

wanting a new taste in his mouth?

(Or am I giving the sad eyes too much

meaning?) )

41

He stomps on the hardwood floors

when he is upset, and lunges

forward like his disappointments,

snapping his jaws on empty air

in our direction

in reproof.

42

He is all voice

and motion.

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44

If you strap this dog into a harness,

he can climb mountains with the

two-leggeds.

He can scramble halfway up

a boulder without a harness,

and he will.

45

What a hard, long time he has

waiting for us

to finish a poem

and get up

to fill up first

one steel bowl

and then the

other.

Food,

water,

all he owns,

if you don’t count everything.

If you don’t count us.

He drags the bowls

and drops them

with a clang

at our feet.

46

Then, there was the day

we were sure he would die

after swallowing so many

Ferrero Rocher

French chocolate candies.

A whole tray.

We followed him sorrowfully

around the house, waiting

for any distress. Debated

calling the vet preemptively.

But this was not his first miracle.

He played

with his usual clumps of batting

he made of toys, begged to go

outside, left piles of gold foil

around the yard

and was fine.

47

What he would have done

to break outside

any given day

What he would have done,

what he did

to get into

our foolish affections

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49

Gus has a beard.

I haven’t even mentioned that.

All these poems and yet

to point out the beard

of thick, curly hairs

punctuating his chin.

Going grey.

Old man dog.

50

What weight

of such an ancient face.

Perched

on the edge of a knee.

When awake

and when sleeping.

51

What rules

we break

to sleep

alongside

such a

creature,

and give over

to him our covers,

and wake

earlier than

we would have

ever wanted,

for the

privilege

of leading

him out

into snow,

chasing

him back

in.

52

His underbelly brindling

a blur

53

He takes up a moving swath

of the queen-sized bed

and seriously all of the blankets.

A projectile dog nest.

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55

Once, we taught him to swim.

By which I mean we threw him

into the river over and over again

until it took.

We would have to call and haul him back

out forever after.

56

Once, in the Tetons,

Gus disappeared up the river.

We shouted for him through the dusk,

with the feeling of witnessing the end

of the world. We put ourselves

toward bears and elk,

anything that might have lured him

would have us too.

We ran out of flashlight

and groped back to the campsite.

Startled by him returning to us !,

a wet and shaking shadow.

It hailed and hailed that night,

rattling our tent. We kept close watch.

57

Once, in the Snowies,

where we snowshoed out brazenly

to make a New Year’s Eve campfire,

Gus chased our glow-in-the-dark Frisbee

and brought it back each time.

We stayed so long

we almost lost our way out.

58

Once, in a blue Honda CRV,

we drove from Wyoming to Maryland,

dropping me off in Michigan.

Gus and I didn't drive stick,

so we spent the tripfalling asleep

on each other, cradled in clothes and

towels and wrappers and backpacks,

first on the backseat and then I ended up

on the floor between the seats.

59

I knew that silly dog's breath,

his wet smell and dry smell,

the emotion of his footfalls,

the translation of

most his barks and huffs.

60

We raised him,

from a bitty whippersnapper

to a big one.

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In case you haven't figured it,

this is a dog love story.

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♥

63

Gus.

He's wobbly as a chicken boy,

Squirmy as something dug up

from underground. He flops

his whole body against you,

sometimes misses and slides

to the ground. Dramatically.

64

He drapes his weight

over any part of you

you leave exposed.

65

He sits in your chair

with a tetris of limbs,

the lower parts all drooping

over the edge.

66

He liked to go up on his hind legs;

we liked to hold his front paws in ours

to dance.

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What do dogs dream,

to make the pointer’s muscles twitch

the way they do? So I wake up

on a soft puppy pillow, going

around the bed

in six or more directions

like he does?

His eyes dart behind the lids.

He burrows his face

and runs his paws.

I always guess he is chasing something.

69

Once, we tried to put him in booties

to protect his feet from the snow,

and his face let us know how we had

betrayed him, just like

gravity, just like balance.

70

He would turn his back to you,

to pout, and bark once.

71

On Sunday brunch days,

he wedges onto the couch

between our notepads, library books,

whiskey glasses, and elk horn detritus,

waiting for the meal to be served.

He's not a fool. He knows there's bacon,

remembers it being put under the lid.

We’ve chased him out of the kitchen

since then. One of us on guard duty.

He asks, Why does it take six people

so long to sit down at a table?

72

He can smell anything you can hide.

He can climb taller than any of your

furniture

and fit in small spaces.

Did you really want a dog smarter than

you?

73

When he had been bad,

he would back himself

into a box, his crate,

or the laundry basket.

Only doleful eyes

and then he's gone.

74

Do you wish he could talk or not really?

Only for dinner parties.

He already makes his preferences known.

75

Once, we found him in his dog bed

snuggling a ketchup bottle we

were sure we’d left in the fridge.

76

Once, we thought starting tug of war

from the top of the staircase

was an ingenious plan.

Most dogs would have kept playing

from the ground.

After two tugs, Gus realized

he could climb up behind his person

on the stairs and get taller than

she could reach above.

Game over.

77

Speaking of other dogs. Less-good dogs.

Once, there were 17 miniature

dachshunds born into the apartment

below us. Gus hunted them

through the floor grates.

He suddenly had to go

when they were in the yard.

He howled

his sympathy and sulked

when two of the puppies (too small)

were separated from their mother.

We thought he matched them all,

matched us all in his disbelief.

78

I am not writing these love poems

for other dogs.

79

I borrowed Argos

for weekends at a time

and let him walk me

out of myself.

80

He was a pointer, did I say that?,

and would go on point,

one paw raised and bent like an arrow,

when he found what he was looking for.

81

He could catch the fifth sparrow

before the sixth passes by.

82

I get my tenses mixed up.

83

I was less exact,

though just as excitable.

84

Do you remember Argos,

from the Odyssey? Odysseus' dog,

who waited two decades for his person

to come home after being lost at sea?

85

I got in other cars. Drove them.

Did other cross-country trips.

I left

and circled back.

86

He moved higher

into the mountains.

87

I moved back

to the Great Lakes.

And settled in.

88

I do not have a dog.

89

I do have a dog.

90

Gus was my

what a good dog.