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
32
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.
36
37
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
48
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.
54
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.
61
In case you haven't figured it,
this is a dog love story.
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♥
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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.
67
68
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.