Pre-order Your Signed Copy of My Collection of Poems, “Fallow Field”
September 16, 2013
This fall, the Aldrich Press is publishing my long-awaited new collection of poetry, FALLOW FIELD.
The book consists of 45 poems, representing my best work from the past quarter century.
You can order your signed copy of FALLOW FIELD here:
My poetry has received the Nebraska Review Award and the Aldrich Emerging Poets Award, and I have been a Concordia Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts.
My poems have appeared in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies or online, including the American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Anon, La Petite Zine, Many Mountains Moving, and Terrain, among other publications.
I am also the author of a book of natural history, Walks in Nature’s Empire
The paperback book is 96 pages, including front and back matter, with a gorgeous cover photograph by my good friend Joshua Sheldon (see picture), which was taken at the same time and has the same origin of inspiration as the title poem. (You can read the poem and its story here: “Fallow Field.”)
Here is what others have said about this collection, FALLOW FIELD:
“Scott Edward Anderson’s poems honor the reality that the things of the world – rye grass, fall warblers, ravens, owls, ‘Sargassum drifting/ in a pelagic wave,’ lovers and sourdough bread – speak to and for our innerness. Here the sense of place is not simply a matter of geography, but of feeling one’s way into that sense of becoming that makes one’s path clear. The book’s fourth section is comprised of poems that beautifully embrace the very human need to join the inner and outer, a territory defined, as the poem titles suggest, by ‘Becoming,’ ‘Shapeshifting,’ ‘Cultivating,’ ‘Mapping,’ and ‘Healing.’ Guided since childhood, as the book’s closing long poem relates, by nature’s teaching, Anderson is devoted to finding the words for what it means to dwell mindfully among others on the wounded earth.”
–Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Rope: Poems
“I was impressed by Anderson’s engagement with nature — especially the way in which his lyrical lines sketch the profound relationship between humans and their environment.”
– Jonathan Galassi, author of Left-handed: Poems
“Wow, Pop, I had no idea you wrote so many poems!”
– Walker Anderson, the author’s 10-year-old son
My poetry is rooted in nature and grounded in what Robert Hass called the “strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two.” (Hass, Introduction to Best American Poetry 2001)
I studied with Hass and with Gary Snyder, along with the late Walter Pavlich, and received some great mentoring and advice from poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Donald Hall, Colette Inez, and Karen Swenson, as well as wonderful friends and readers.
My poetry is informed by a deep engagement with the natural world, attuned to the smallest details and complexities of nature and our experience of place. Attentiveness and mindfulness are critical to my method of working, both as the poem first evolves and later, through the often rigorous process of revision.
I believe poetry is the most direct language with which to approach our place in the world and reconnect us to nature. By nature, I mean not only the natural world, but also the built environment; not only the processes and causal powers of the physical world, but our immediate experience of the spiritual and the non-human.
For the past twenty five years, I have been building a body of poetry that tries to achieve my goal of writing that is open, approachable, and eminently readable, at the same time that it is intellectual and revels in the joy of language. FALLOW FIELD represents the best of my poetry over that time.
Order your signed copy of FALLOW FIELD below:
Much Ado About Nada: Harper’s “Poetry Slam”
June 22, 2013
Harper’s Magazine, July 2013
Okay, so I read the Mark Edmundson article, “Poetry Slam, or the Decline of American Verse.”
The essay was supposed to have all us poets rending our garments and pounding our chests in anger. At least, that’s according to Ron Charles of the Washington Post, whose summation you can read here.
To read the full article, you have to buy the July 2013 issue of Harper’s, because you can’t access it without a subscription. Which begs the question, who subscribes to Harper’s anymore, really?
What I found there was nothing earth shattering. Edmunson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, makes some fairly common complaints about the baby boomer generation of contemporary poets, a generation of which I am on the cusp. (In the interest of full disclosure, I studied with one of the poets he criticizes and had a poem selected for recognition by another.)
Edmundson offers criticisms of some usual suspects (John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass), a decidedly weak argument against Seamus Heaney, and one of the first, valid pot-shots I’ve seen aimed at Paul Muldoon and his tenure as tastemaker of poetry at The New Yorker.
He also pokes fun at Anne Carson, who is overdue, but for her part has been poking fun at us readers for years, so what’s the point?
Ultimately, Edmundson seems to be arguing for much the same kind of politically aware and socially engaged poet that Ginsberg, Whitman, and Eliot (!) represented. And the sort of heightened language deployed by Robert Lowell in his best days. Edmundson longs for the liberal left, activist branch of poetry — although he admits that Fr. Eliot doesn’t really fit that mold.
In addition, he calls for a poetry that exploits the same veins of popular culture — references to TV shows, the Internet, and current events — that a younger generation has been mining for the past decade.
Reading his essay, I wonder whether Edmundson has read any poet born after, say, the late 1950s? He clearly has not spent any time with poets as pop-culture savvy as Matthew Zapruder, Dorothea Lasky, and Matthew Rohrer.
I doubt Edmundson has read the “unapologetically queer poet activist, ” CA Conrad, who can best be described as the love-child of a ménage à trois between Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman wrapped up in glitter, nail polish, and parapsychology. (And I write that with affection for CA and his writing.)
Neither, I suspect, has Edmundson read Natasha Trethewey, who writes about race, identity, and family in much of her work.
If Edmundson really wants to read poets writing about nothing, he should check out what I call the “Seinfeld Generation” of poets: the Dickman twins (one of whom wrote that annoying Clint Eastwood Chrysler Super Bowl commercial, “Halftime in America”) or the over-lauded Timothy Donnelly, whose linguistic pyrotechnics are certainly as “perpetually hedging” as anything Ashbery has written.
Hard for Edmundson to make the argument he’s making while his reading is seemingly so “generationally challenged.”
While I agree with some of what Edmundson says — that much contemporary poetry seems lacking in ambition — his is the same kind of argument critics made of John Lennon’s last solo recordings.
They found Lennon’s mature work — he was 39 — to be more domesticated, self-absorbed, and solipsistic than his earlier, more political solo work, much of which strikes one as facile now. (Does anyone really prefer “Some Time in New York City” to John’s songs on “Double Fantasy”?)
I’ve seen some over the top reactions in defense of “contemporary” poetry resulting from this latest jeremiad about the sorry state of the art, but I suspect they didn’t read past Harper’s pay wall. At least, after reading the complete essay in the magazine, I don’t see how Edmundson’s prose could get any poet’s panties in a twist.
My friend Dan Nester had perhaps the most sober, cogent reaction I’ve read. He wrote entertainingly on the subject as part of his blog’s “Notes” series.
In the end, I applaud Edmundson for caring enough to persuade the editors of this once-relevant magazine to publish his essay about everyone’s favorite, once-relevant art form.
But, really, this essay is much ado about nothing.
Today is poet Gary Snyder’s birthday. He is 83 years old.
I studied with Gary and he had a big impact on my poetry, which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog.
You won’t find traces of his influence in my work, stylistically at any rate; rather you’ll find it in my deep engagement of nature, in how I pay attention, and “be crafty and get the work done.”
Happy birthday Gary!
Here is Gary Snyder’s poem, “Old Bones”:
Old Bones
Out there walking round, looking out for food,
a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack
plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,
barely getting by,
no food out there on dusty slopes of scree—
carry some—look for some,
go for a hungry dream.
Deer bone, Dall sheep,
bones hunger home.
Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.
What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.
–Gary Snyder
And here is a recording of Gary reading “Old Bones”:
Ada Limón’s poetic world is one where dislocation leads to an opening up rather than a shutting down, an unfolding rather than sequestration, and where doors are open, not closed. She isn’t afraid to confront her emotions or to let the reader in to observe her reactions to those emotions.
Yet, Limón’s is not a confessional poetry or, at least, not in the derogatory sense of that word. Limón tells stories and she’s proud of that fact.
“It’s ingrained in human nature to crave stories,” Limón explained in an interview. “We want them read to us as children, to be told around the fire, we want to see ourselves, our lives in these stories, and to have a sense of both escapism and transformation. People don’t know that poetry can do that, because they have the preconceived notion that poems take a tremendous amount of work to even comprehend, let alone be moved by.”
Her poems are not meant solely for the page, but to be read aloud. Her language is fluid, whether describing dreams or reality or the blurring between the two.
As Jeffrey Cyphers Wright wrote in The Brooklyn Rail, “She personalizes her homilies, stamping them with the authenticity of invention and self-discovery.”
Born March 28, 1976, Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California, and now divides her time between there and Lexington, Kentucky. Her first collection of poetry, lucky wreck, won the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is also the author of This Big Fake World, winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize, and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010).
Here is Ada Limón’s poem, “Sharks in the Rivers”:
We’ll say unbelievable things
to each other in the early morning—
our blue coming up from our roots,
our water rising in our extraordinary limbs.
All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles
and ghosts of men, and spirits
behind those birds of flame.
I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.
It is a short walkway—
into another bedroom.
Consider the handle. Consider the key.
I say to a friend, how scared I am of sharks.
How I thought I saw them in the creek
across from my street.
I once watched for them, holding a bundle
of rattlesnake grass in my hand,
shaking like a weak-leaf girl.
She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says,
Sharks bite fewer people each year than
New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.
Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks.
Through another doorway, I walk to the East River saying,
Sharks are people too.
Sharks are people too.
Sharks are people too.
I write all the things I need on the bottom
of my tennis shoes. I say, Let’s walk together.
The sun behind me is like a fire.
Tiny flames in the river’s ripples.
I say something to God, but he’s not a living thing,
so I say it to the river, I say,
I want to walk through this doorway
But without all those ghosts on the edge,
I want them to stay here.
I want them to go on without me.
I want them to burn in the water.
–Ada Limón
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Don Share’s poetry resume reads like something from another era, when men and women of letters were perhaps more common.
Not the tenure-track kind of poet one finds in universities, but the sort that is actively engaged in poetry – as an editor, as a translator, a critic, and as a writer – on a daily basis. He was poetry editor of Harvard Review, the Partisan Review, and a senior editor of Poetry magazine.
He’s published three books of his own poems, translated Seneca and Miguel Hernandez, and compiled two books of verse by the great Basil Bunting, as well as co-editing The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine.
Share’s own poems are pithy, witty, and verbally gymnastic. Occasionally he takes a pun or a rhyme a little too far until it snaps back or more likely turns inside out. He’s fascinated by words and how they transform each other in the music of varying line length and tone.
And he is always aware, as poet Tom Sleigh writes in a blurb for Wishbone, Share’s latest collection, “of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness.”
The title poem, “Wishbone,” Share said in an interview, “is in the voice of a dying cat, and from his perspective, human beings are in charge, making godlike decisions in the face of which he feels powerless, though this is a tough cat and he suffers no loss of nobility or character even at the very end of it all. Needless to say, a cat can’t talk; I wanted to give one language for a short spell so he could speak his piece. A bit of tragicomic relief, you might say.”
Here is Don Share’s poem “Wishbone”:
I have a bone to pick
with whoever runs this joint.
I don’t much like
being stuck out in the rain
just to feed on the occasional
vole or baby rabbit
and these wet weed-salads
confound my intestines.
A cat can’t throw himself
into the Des Plaines River,
not even in the luscious fall.
I get yelled at in human
language every single day
for things I can’t begin
to comprehend, let alone change.
But I go on cleaning myself –
why shouldn’t I? –
and so I think I smell sweet,
even though I suspect otherwise.
I wouldn’t harm a fly normally,
but why doesn’t anybody
take care of me? How am I
supposed to know that it’s Easter,
that I’m not allowed to die
in my own bed, and that neither prong
of this wishbone is meant for me?
–Don Share
Eastern Redbud Tree (Cercis canadensis) blossoms - photo © Valerie Reneé
on Flickr - noncommercial use permitted with attribution / no derivative works
The Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) is one of my favorite trees. Native to eastern North America from southern Ontario to northern Florida, the redbud is an early harbinger of spring.
Also known as the “Judas tree,” it is among the first to bloom. In my experience, it flowers before the cherries and magnolias in the mid-Atlantic.
The redbud is easily recognizable from its showy, magenta to fuchsia-pink flowers appearing in clusters from March to May. Rather than bursting out of the ends of branches, however, the redbud’s flowers seem to “break out” on bare stems before the leaves and sometimes on the trunk itself.
The flowers are pollinated by long-tongued bees such as blueberry bees, carpenter bees and mining or miner bees.
Calvin, my pitbull, is no stranger to my readers and friends. I’ve written about him before and he had quite a few followers on my Twitter account (@greenskeptic) where I often post pictures of him.
Calvin in the Wissahickon
My poem, “Redbud & Pitbull,” originated from a scene I witnessed sitting on the porch of my former house two years ago. The redbud I had planted there a few years back had still produced no flowers.
I was curious about this fact and about the frenetic activity of the mining bees, which should have been pollinating the redbud, because both seemed to be indicative of my life at the time. I was simultaneously unsettled and not yet ready to flower.
What a difference a few years makes: the redbud flowered for the first time this year — and what glorious flowers have bloomed in my life!
Here is my poem, “Redbud & Pitbull”:
The mining bees are emerging.
Males zipping around
tiny holes in the ground
where females are burrowing
beneath the redbud.
The males have a curious display;
more manic than romantic,
expecting a mate to think crazy
is sexy or superior.
I guess we all
fall prey to a little crazy
love now and again,
do something foolish,
cross a line or two.
But the bees flying too close
to the ground are just frantic,
can’t imagine they’d make
suitable mates.
They course and dive and zip
(yes, that’s the best word for it, zip),
while females wait below the redbud.
My pitbull Calvin watches
the mining bees swirling
above and into the ground
beneath the redbud. He thinks,
Who or what are these (things)
buzzing and drilling in the dirt?
Truth is, the mining bees
–neither food nor friend—
pay him little interest.
Now Calvin grows bored,
slopes over to the sidewalk
flopping down in the sun.
The redbud’s waxy leaves
glisten in the same sun,
green edging into red.
Calvin is mottled, piebald,
brindle and white with a big brown
eye patch that makes people smile.
He’s a lover, not a fighter.
He cares little why the redbud’s shock
of fuchsia flowers, like scales or
a rash running up the limbs hasn’t shown.
He has no word for flowers
and little time for bees.
–Scott Edward Anderson
P.S. This poem, along with “Calvin’s Story,” appeared in Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology, published by Salmon Press. If you love dogs and poetry, you must have this book – it makes a great Mother’s Day gift too!
Alison Hawthorne Deming and raccoon cub.
I love when poetry shows up in unexpected places.
The Poetry Society of America and the MTA recently revived their “Poetry in Motion” program on the New York City subways.
The Clint Eastwood Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler, written by poet Matthew Dickman, is another example.
“The Language of Conservation,” a Poets House project that provides residencies for poets in zoos around the country, is still another.
So I was thrilled when American Scientist magazine published my friend Alison Hawthorne Deming‘s poem “Mosquitoes” in a recent issue.
Alison lives in the Tucson desert and draws inspiration from the natural world there, her native New England, as well as Grand Manan Island, Canada, where she has a family home, the Everglades, Alaska — really, wherever she is.
Her work has long been concerned with the relationship between art and science — her first book was titled Science & Other Poems — and the science of looking at the world. So her appearance in a scientific magazine is not really a surprise, but the fact that the magazine publishes poetry at all is to be celebrated.
Alison’s books include the poetry collection Rope (Penguin, 2009) and the essay collection The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998). She is coeditor of The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, revised edition 2011).
Formerly director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Alison teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona and also serves as chair of the board of directors for Orion magazine. She recently completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit.
Whether writing about individual species (The Monarchs), entire ecosystems, or the human despoilment of nature, Alison trains a scientist’s eye on her subjects. Yet, she’s not afraid to add a little wry humor into the mix.
“Mosquitoes” offers an enlightened victim’s view of this annoying insect, prompting us to appreciate its singleness of purpose and a reciprocity with which most of us would rather not comply.
Here is Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Mosquitoes”:
First came the scouts who felt our sweat in the air
and understood our need to make a sacrifice.
We were so large and burdened with all we had carried,
our blood too rich for our own good. They understood
that we could give what they needed and never miss it.
Then came the throng encircling our heads like acoustic haloes
droning with the me-me-me of appetite. We understood
their pleasure to find such hairless beasts so easy to open and drink.
We understood their female ardor to breed and how little
they had to go on considering the protein required to make
their million-fold eggs. Vibrant, available, and hot,
we gave our flesh in selfless service to their future.
— Alison Hawthorne Deming
Frederick Seidel at home in New York, 2009. Photo by Antonin Kratochovil/Vii
Poet Michael Hofmann, in his entertaining review of Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009
Hofmann draws comparisons with V.S. Naipaul and quotes from a new biography of that author saying the two are purveyors of “picong, a Trinidadian term, ‘from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.’”
The New York Times called Seidel the “Laureate of the Louche,” which is to say simultaneously rakish and appealing. He is a poet with a penchant for the most expensive hotels, bespoke suits, handmade shoes, and Italian racing bikes – of the motor kind, not pedaling – and a strange, nearly fatal attraction to all that is dark and violent and decadent.
One is never quite sure if Seidel is putting it on – does he really do the things he says in his poems or is it all a persona? Is he playing with the reader the way he plays with form, with lines, with puns, with rhyme? That is to say, masterfully.
“Convinced life is meaningless, / I lack the courage of my conviction,” Seidel wrote in an early poem, “After the Party,” but then opens two poems – “Racer” and “Fog” — with the same line: “I spend most of my time not dying./ That’s what living is for.
Seidel’s poetry burns with a fury matched only by the leatherclad poet hitting 120 MPH on his custom-built Ducati. He takes a perverse pleasure in imagining his own fiery death, which hasn’t come; the poet turned 76 this year.
Take these lines from “A Gallop to Farewell,” quoted by Hoffmann:
The most underrated pleasure in the world is the takeoff
Of the Concorde and putting off the crash
Of the world’s most beautiful old supersonic plane,
with no survivors,
In an explosion of champagne.
Readers and critics either love or hate Seidel. There is no middle ground. But he couldn’t care less. He’s never taught or sought tenure or prizes or even a “career” in poetry, which is kind of an oxymoron anyway. He studied with Robert Lowell, but shook off his teacher’s influence pretty early on and hasn’t been associated with any poetry “movement.”
And while Seidel’s first book came out in 1963, he blossomed late, with 17 years between his first and second collection and 10 books published over the past two decades, culminating in his 500-page, 50 years worth of poems, which is the best of poetry I’ve read in a long time. What I mean by that is Seidel’s POEMS does what William Styron said a good book should: it leaves you slightly exhausted at the end because you lived several lives while reading it.
Here is Frederick Seidel’s “Fog”:
I spend most of my time not dying.
That’s what living is for.
I climb on a motorcycle.
I climb on a cloud and rain.
I climb on a woman I love.
I repeat my themes.
Here I am in Bologna again.
Here I go again.
Here I go again, getting happier and happier.
I climb on a log
Torpedoing toward the falls
Basically, it sticks out of me.
At the factory,
The racer being built for me
Is not ready, but is getting deadly.
I am here to see it being born.
It is snowing in Milan, the TV says.
They close one airport, then both.
The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.
He buzzes me through three layers of security
To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department
Where I will breathe my last.
Trains are delayed.
The Florence sky is falling snow.
Tonight in Bologna is fog.
This afternoon, there it was,
With all the mechanics who are making it around it.
It stood on a sort of altar.
I stood in a sort of fog.
Taking digital photographs of my death.
–Frederick Seidel
Juvenilia: “Snow Sleeping November”
November 19, 2011
Painting by Lisa Hess Hesselgrave, November 2002
JUVENILIA
1: compositions produced in the artist’s or author’s youth
2: artistic or literary compositions suited to or designed for the young
Origin of JUVENILIALatin, neuter plural of juvenilisFirst Known Use: 1622
As the Wikipedia entry for Juvenilia explains: “the term was first used in 1622 in George Wither‘s poetry collection Ivvenilia. Later, other notable poets, such as John Dryden and Alfred Lord Tennyson came to use the term for collections of their early poetry. Jane Austen‘s earlier literary works are also known by the name of Juvenilia. An exception to retrospective publication is Leigh Hunt’s collection Juvenilia, first published when he was still in his teens.”
One of my earliest extant poems, written when I was 15, came to my attention recently. The poem is called “Snow Sleeping November.” I was surprised by its language and resonance, although some of it seems over-written and bears too heavy an influence of Whitman, Frost, Hopkins, and perhaps Stephen Crane.
I can still see the cabin in New York’s Finger Lakes that provided its inspiration.
Here is my poem,
“Snow Sleeping November”
I realize the briskness of this November eve,
the quiet, complacency of stiff snow,
the darkness of full‑breasted snowclouds,
all of us retaining warmth
like soapstone.
My cup is full of hot water
the wood in the fire
gleams like cat’s eyes & gives-off a
sun‑like warmth‑‑radiant, welcoming.
Short days & long, frozen nights,
girding my boots
for the crisp winterchill,
wind driving drafts up my nose.
The sparkling, icy water
and trees stiff in the dead weight
of snow‑leaden branches.
Poets crawling at the clouds
pulling snow groundfast‑‑
Those November trees!
–Scott Edward Anderson
The painting is a sketch by my friend Lisa Hess Hesselgrave from my personal collection. You can see more work by Lisa at LisaHesselgrave.com
Calvin as we found him, October 2009
My pitbull Calvin was adopted a year and a half ago from the PSPCA.
When we asked about his story, we heard a horrible tale of abuse and abandonment followed by rescue and recovery and, ultimately, his second chance.
I composed a poem out of Calvin’s story for Jessie Lendennie’s wonderful book, Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology,![""](http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=1907056505&camp=217145&creative=399349")
Here is my poem,
“Calvin’s Story”
“Make it stop, make it stop,”
was all I kept thinking;
my eyes closed, some
bully biting my body, limbs,
tearing flesh and hair—
Boys pinned me to the pavement,
each one holding a leg, holding
me down on my back.
Another boy – so there were 5?
–pressing the bully into me
head lashing at anything
it could grab with canines.
I’m surprised I didn’t black out—
Then, I remember a scuffle.
I was almost unconscious,
drifting in an out—
Two men freed my limbs,
but still I couldn’t move.
One chased the boys
while the other lifted me,
cradled me, into a van.
I’ll never forget the smell
–camphor, maybe, almost
lavender, medicinal.
The gentle one dabbed my
wounds with a wet cloth,
stroked me slowly, dabbed
–there was a lot of blood;
were there sirens? I don’t
remember sirens. (Should
there have been sirens?)
The next thing I remember
is being on a cold, metal
table – a nurse or doctor
looking me over – another
shaking her head. The first
mumbles something (all I hear
is “Dog,” that word they have
for us), then I’m sure she said,
“This one’s a keeper, let’s give
him a second chance…”
I wake in a crate, damp towel
beneath me, head swirling.
I must be in the “pound,”
there are others barking.
(I wish they would be quiet;
my head hurts.) Then
the pretty nurse or doctor
comes in, mumbles to me;
I look up, try to smile
(this seems to please her),
and I slip in and out of sleep.
Months later,
I’m sitting on a street corner,
leashed, with some of the nice pound
people. A lot of people pass by,
they pat my head, mumble
in that way they do, until one
couple lingers (a child or two
are with them, I can’t recall).
They mumble to the pound people;
one of them (Alpha, I’ll call him)
walks me; he has a firm hand,
but is gentle, in control.
Oh how I wish for a forever
family…but I don’t
want to get my hopes up.
Then, the day is over,
back to the pound – sigh –
guess it wasn’t meant to be.
Next night, however, there
is Alpha, and he’s brought
some others. (Oh, let me be
on best behavior so they will
take me home.) They seem
to like when I snuggle, listen,
take commands, lick the cute
young ones – they are salty sweet!
Days go by after that night,
the pound people tell me
to get ready. Maybe, just maybe,
this is a good sign. Oh, I get so
excited my butt wiggles faster and
faster. Finally, the day comes;
Alpha arrives with the others,
and I think, This is it. I’m going home
with my forever family…to a home;
home at last for my second chance.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 