The Spy Holiday Poem: Old Dog by Sue Ellen Thompson

The Spy continues our tradition in sharing the best of local poetry as our way to celebrate this holiday season. Once again, we turn to Oxford’s very gifted Sue Ellen Thompson for this tender and moving ode to old dogs which have a very special place in the hearts of all Talbot County residents.

The Talbot Spy editors, writers, and volunteers send our best Seasons Greetings and best wishes for a wonderful new year.

 

Old Dog

They haul her in across the frozen yard

for supper on a carpet scrap. Overweight,

gums speckled, slack, she lets herself be raised

and lowered, urged to eat and praised

for doing what she must to keep her furred flanks

heaving heavily in what is mostly sleep.

When I get old, my mother said once,

toss me in a snowbank. Now she taps

the colored capsules on her flattened palm

until the old dog lifts her nose and sends

her tongue out in a slow unfurling sideways.

At night, my father lugs her by the collar out

to the frost-rimed slope behind the shed

and bracing her hindquarters with his feet,

presses gently on her bladder. Before

the first snow fell, he dug a hole for her

up by the rusted harrow where the Christmas trees

are dumped, the last wild place in all

their five tamed acres. Now she rehearses

by the wood stove in a doze so deep

she doesn’t hear the vacuum cleaner prowling

all around her, or the snap of her leash

against my father’s thigh, or down the hall,

the teenage cousins playing their guitars,

singing how they’re going to live forever

and when they die it will be for love,

by which they mean despite it.

 

Sue Ellen Thompson, of Oxford, MD, is the first “featured writer” in the Delmarva Review. These poems are from a collection in the journal’s first edition, in 2008 edition. Among her published works, a fifth book of poems, THEY, was published in 2014. She has been an instructor at The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, since 2007, and has previously taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, the University of Delaware, and Central Connecticut State University. She received the 2010 Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.