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KULTA
1988.
January. Day 27.
A
dark Wednesday kitchen. 5am.
Kulta
died.
Didn’t
you, baby? Hair in the
eyes,
fox-faced
scurry and grrr,
terse
terrier, little ruffian,
90
in man-years and loved like a child.
Gone,
Kulta doggy. Gone, dear.
Poor
little tyke, locked in the garden rain
when
we left, summer mornings. But
it never mattered;
the
first home was stammered at with pardons,
yappy
forgiveness, tongue-lashings of love.
Poor
tyke, locked in a boring kitchen
when
we left, winter mornings. In
your youth
you
liked (we said) to stay out in the winter, kept hot
coursing
the fence’s length to peek through splits
at
the hound dog next door who ignored you.
What
enviable, intense excitement
just
in every hello!
Your
barking now comes distant and hoarse,
through
clay capillaries, through the trumpet vines
our
garden’s mistress-guardian had put
into
the soil she broke and tucked you into,
wrapped
in your kennel blanket.
I
hear you, or say I do. That might be true
if
I had lavished love the way you did.
A
blindly loyal friend, but now gone where
you
warm shadows—you’re our folk tale now.
Stiff
as a door, paws bolted out in death,
you
lay that morning as the departed do,
leaving
externals only, taxidermy.
Kulta,
dear doggy, pardon us that we
loved
death’s scruffy copy of what was you.
Call
it part of a transition....
As
babies do, you taught us how to love.
Could
I have assumed the Aeschylean tears
with
which she woke me? ‘Kulta
died
at
5 o’clock this morning.’—No.
You
were one reason at least one of us
had
to come home early.
‘Baby,
don’t cry,’ she sobbed, her face
wet
with dumb agony as I drove us
to
a vet’s surgery that rainy night.
Animals
cry, she knew: whole parks, as if
they
thought a thunder their last closing time.
I
was as tense, though you were known
as
not exactly my dog. You
belonged
specially
to our other boy, your ‘brother’.
Crispin
and you had grown up together.
I
look out at the cold, recall the spirit
we
do not have to lock out now workdays.
And
no more need we cage the letterbox
or
guard an open front door from escapes.
One
day, when I came home, the heart
forgot,
and ceased to fall. But it
does now.
Love
is a habit we don’t know we have
until
we cannot humour it, time-honoured
and
nature’s own amphetamine. Before
death
makes its point the heart has need
to
get into relation and live near.
You
barked at the ringing of telephone,
the
scrape of dustbins and, whilst still
a
few streets off, the loopy tease at gates
of
an approaching postman.
Pussy-cats,
newspaper girls—the less welcome
a
comer the more jealously you woofed.
But
with family you were silly, yappy, licky,
and
so we miss you.
There
is no scratching now from the other side
except
from the cruel imposture of branches.
There
is no need to let you attack the dark
and
pee within safe distance of the door-light.
That
day, your back legs packed it in, gave up,
You’d
had a stroke, old son, out there alone
among
the soggy leaves, and we weren’t there.
As
ghost you grow each year you fade,
a
nose that found from our discarded shoes
if
any day we’d been to some new place.
As
hair and bone disintegrates, I’m sorry,
and
not just for forgetting.
You’re
out with others we have seen away,
parents
and friends, those good for us.
You
would have liked the ginger cat and starlings,
and
the squirrels we chat about these days.
After
the puppy kisses, you took us on
and
we grew strangely hungrier each day
for
family reassurance, just like you.
Sentiment
thinks that you forgave our rules
but
not that last indignity of dying.
You
fiercely tore your wicker basket bed.
No
one can grieve as she who all night long
sat
with you in the kitchen and let you die
beside
her, remembering and weeping, who then
straightaway
buried you by the fence picket
you
favoured most, and set upon your grave
the
ball you chased and favoured most.
Our
mourning speaks to parts of us you knew.
Alan
Marshfield
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