Home Issues Contributors Submissions Contact Links Take Action PoetryDepot
Carmine Giordano
For Spanky:
-----now in memoriam
Martyrdom is animal.
Secret wounds are not restricted to visionary nuns
like Jennifer Jones in the old Bernadette film.
Spanky, my fat and aging dog, has a cancerous growth on his tail
and suffers his pain intermittently with house watching
barking, and begging scraps of dinner meat.
He has the patina and rivuleted eyes of agonized ascetics,
and like a good saint, he is of good cheer
keeping his discomfort to himself
though nightly by my bed he does betray a whimper for the wound.
His place will be high in the pantheon of saints
when his time comes. I will hang a banner down from my window sill
of Spanky in glory, tufted by the Cherubim,
a miracle from doggydom: this dumb dog, Christ-bearing
taught me how in a difficult world
to keep my pain in peace among the neighbors
talking of the rain and of the radio
and of how the times we live in are hard
and of the senselessness of things,
and of how you just want to stop sometimes.
Copyright (c)Carmine Giordano, 2005. All rights reserved.
Web page design by Velene Campbell
Web page editing and site optimization by Peter Bunce - e-mail: techsolutions@netscape.net