The Friday Poem on 07/06/2024
This glorious poem is packed with arresting imagery and precise language – those mourning bands, those crescent claws, the “spread” of the starling. It reads simply, but much attention has been paid to the play of sound — listen to all those words ending in ‘d’ in the third stanza. Gatehouse takes a grim theme – one animal’s obsession with dark matter, the stuff of life and death – and makes a kind of celebration out of it, carrying us from the base to the transcendent.
My Dog Brings me Back to Death
When he doesn’t respond to my call
I leave the path, push bracken aside
to find him rolling on badger pelt,
soft-bristle, a cub
not long emerged from the sett
now curled around its own death,
mourning bands masking the eyes,
tiny claws like new moons.
And he brings me back to them all —
the savaged, the roadkill, the starved,
an instinct that lurks like a wolf
between the base pairs of his DNA.
He must writhe out this obsession
until his coat crawls with decay —
rank stain of fox, wool-scraps
nudged from the carcass of a sheep.
Once there was a starling, half
decomposed on the edge of the road.
I would have walked past, unseeing
but he, addict that he is,
nosed deep, nuzzling dark matter
and I came to kneel by the verge
his leash in my hands,
in the spread of that broken bird
a riot of shattered golds —
all I could do to hold him off —
neither of us able
to rub the stars out of its wings.
