Watching Merdle on the Winter Morning of My 50th Birthday after Listening to Dobby Gibson Read “After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s ‘The Spring of My Life on My 49th Birthday’”
My alarm goes off:
a pocket-sized chaos
ordered with the authority of my thumb,
a reminder to check on Merdle, the dog,
who is in the backyard
where it is 17 degrees
and the snow is anchored
to the grass with a mortar of ice.
Merdle has been out there for 30 minutes.
I leave the office and walk upstairs
stopping at the wide bay windows to pour
a cup of coffee and consider Merdle
who is doing an inarticulate dance
around a stuffed pink squeakerless chicken,
pausing momentarily to smell walked dogs
a block away, barking and running
wide loops,
then stalking the perimeter of the yard,
then running again, full blast,
then stopping at her chicken-friend-victim
and yelping then plopping into a snowy flower
bed onto her back and twisting
then falling asleep
upside down
for 10 minutes
which tells me:
I do not know
how to live.
2 thoughts on "Watching Merdle on the Winter Morning of My 50th Birthday after Listening to Dobby Gibson Read “After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s ‘The Spring of My Life on My 49th Birthday’”"
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I think you achieve your own “inarticulate dance” here with how you precisely describe the scene and move through the poem. Love “a pocket-sized chaos/ordered with the authority of my thumb,” The movement leads us to the conclusion, which hits and leaves me thinking more widely.
Merdle knows how to live!