holly woodward

GOOD DOG 

The doctor came with a leather muzzle. I said you
didn’t bite, and you were true
to my words. You who
jerked away from every touch as if slapped, you let me cradle your soft velvet snout in my palms, something we’d
practiced so long, but never mastered until that moment.
I watched your last heartbeat, then unclipped
the chain from your neck.
The caretaker stepped into the grave to ease
your body slowly into the hole, the way
a young Nicaraguan had when my mother’s casket had been lowered.
We shoveled dirt but not on the head, that we left as long
as we could unsullied.
I deadheaded
every flower in my garden, the margarites,
the roses, the lilies, the gardenias and scattered
seeds over the shoveled dirt. Here, take this chain
of daisies to pull you out of the grave. I never went back
to my mother’s plot, and only once to my father’s, to bury his sister.
There I kicked aside the funeral home tarp to find myself standing on his name.
Sometimes I want to bury my heart. Sometimes my heart unburies its dead
while I sleep. Most days I keep it on a leash.
Every night this week it has poured, drenched the ground,
weather in which you would not have ventured out.
As the storm thundered, the rain sounded like your paws
on patrol on my walkway—
there, you who were terrified of lighting,
aren’t afraid anymore.

Holly Woodward writes her bio in pets: My tuxedo cat with white legs and white diamonds is named Legs Diamond after the gangster known for his snazzy style. Max Purrkins takes his name from the editor of The Great Gatsby. I later found that Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, also named her cat that; she had pet snails she brought to dinner parties. A wild cat and a dog came from the woods to say they owned me, Gaga and Coco. When I was born, my parents got a more satisfactory Irish Setter; they named him Topper, after the ghost film.