for RR
How does one lay out a dog for burial?
Do it wrong and its ghost will circle
endlessly, unable to lie down.
*
Live dogs aren’t permitted in the cemetery.
We look for their stone snouts among the angels.
*
Has anyone considered that dogs may not want us
with them in heaven?
That we would frighten the wolves?
*
A cemetery is the last refuge of invisible friends.
Here’s someone with a map to celebrity gravesites.
*
Trees at Highgate need not fear the lifted hind leg.
They go wild, permitted
every extravagance except death.
*
I write these notes six weeks later
in a silence greater than any in all London,
sitting in the darkness,
trusting my faithful pen to find the way.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Passage to Exile
- Sacred Teachings of the Ancient Victorians
- Hedera helix
- Boneyard Dogs
- Import/Export
- Mutiny
- In Loving Memory
- One for Sorrow, Two for Joy
- Horror Fictions
- Extremophile
- Curating the Dead
- Artifactual
- Among the Brambles
- Heat Indices
- Grief Bacon
- If there were such things as ghosts
- The life of the body
- The Angel of Confession
- Ghost-writing
- Death Angels
Shit Dave, that first one made me cry. Dog stuff often does, I’m afraid. Doesn’t mean it can’t be good.
Lucy, I too have the ‘dog stuff’ thing! There’s a book by Beverly Nichols… now there’s a writer whose name I rarely hear these days… that despite its sentimental tone had me weeping at a description of the author returning in a dream to the garden of his youth, and hearing the approaching barks of his long-dead dog as it bounded through the woods and fields of a perfect English summer, joyful that its master had at last returned home. Yup… there I go!
Great piece Dave. Highgate cemetery certainly gave you a heap of inspiration. Keep ’em coming. Love the elegiac tone of the last verse. Is that a little tear in my eye? Mmmmm, ‘fraid so! (Note to self: toughen up man, for Christ’s sake!)
Sorry, I meant Beverley Nichols!
Yup, you’ve got the measure of us, Dave. Weepy dog stuff. None among your commenters, I imagine, has seen the Futurama episode Jurassic Bark. It is almost unendurably sad and I wept buckets when shown it by the children. Buckets and also barrels. Don’t watch it, dog people!
But it’s the final four lines that do it with this one. How lovely. Thank you. And Maizy thanks you too.