Dog Day

OSTEoSARCOMA: A LOVE POEM BY YVONNE ZIPTER For Easton, Zooey, and Nacho Cancer loves the long bone, the femur and the fibula, the humerus and ulna, the greyhound’s sleek physique, a calumet, ribboned with fur and eddies of dust churned to a smoke, the sweet slenderness of that languorous lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy, a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow — loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs, the distance between points A and D, epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end but then of course it does, emptying its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel that river of waste and sorrow. I’ve begun a scrapbook: here the limp that started it all, here your scream when the shoulder bone broke, here that walk to the water dish, your leg trailing like a length of   black bunting. And here the words I whispered when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods on that beautiful silky head: Run. Run, my boy-o, in that madcap zigzag, unzipping the air. Source: Poetry (May 2008). I like this for good and bad reasons.  'boy-o" is what I call my dog from time to time, when we are playing certain games.  Makes him sound a bit Irish, which is not a bad thing for a dog of his kind (namely, smart).  Also because I have been worrying a little about him - he has new behaviors which do not go with the monster of even a year ago.  No evidence of any kind that he has a cancer, but close enough for civilian work.  And dead, thinking about dead, so a piece of a theme.