Nobody Likes a Wet Dog

In highschool and undergrad I had equal love for poetry and prose. And then, like the rest of the world, I turned my back to poetry. 

Even so, when I taught at LeTourneau, a sort of basic intro to the genres class, I loved watching people who claimed to hate and not understand poetry come awake to it when we got to that section.

One of the poems I always taught was Dharma by Billy Collins.  

It's funny. It's accessible. It's about a dog.

Billy Collins was one of the presenting authors at this year's Key West Literary Seminar and he read another dog poem, a poem that came to mind this morning.

The skies opened up and I saw my dog not taking shelter under our covered patio but walking out in the grass, sniffing and licking at small pools of water, and I thought of the Collin's poem, "To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now."

My first thought was stupid dog, but my second went to poetry. And it's nice to think of poetry in the morning.

Taken from inside my house through the sliding glass door, because, unlike my dog, I had no desire to play in the rain this morning. 

So here's that poem:

To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now
Billy Collins 

Nobody here likes a wet dog.
No one wants anything to do with a dog
that is wet from being out in the rain
or retrieving a stick from a lake.
Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight
going from one person to another
hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,
something that could be given with one hand
without even wrinkling the conversation.

But everyone pushes her away,
some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.
Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet
until they go to pet her,
push her away,
then wipe their hands on their clothes.
And whenever she heads toward me,
I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

O stranger of the future!
O inconceivable being!
whatever the shape of your house,
however you scoot from place to place,
no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you
may wear,
I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.
I bet everybody in your pub,
even the children, pushes her away. 

Comments

[Susie]

I'm not sure what it says about the intelligence of my son that he just did the same thing outside. First he drank the pool of water on his little slide, then the water on the swing, and then he laid on his belly and drank water off the deck.