Joseph Brodsky’s dog is on a quest
Joseph Brodsky’s dog is on a quest.
He snuffles past neglected plots and crypts,
dog-sniffs every monument,
thrusts his nose into a mouldering layer-cake
of earth and stone, that maddening hint
of bone below.
There was a cat, of that he’s certain.
It’s shizzy scent leads right up to the church
then disappears as if into the air.
He tilts his head, and catches on the wind
the click and sigh of treadle, wheeze of feeders
choked with soil.
He hears it all,
remnants gathered on a thin, grey wind
and gusts of spatty rain:
a moiling hymn,
a voice that calls as if from dream,
the hum of angels hanging piously above him.
He sniffs the air and lifts his hind leg
on the transept wall, considers that it’s time
to head for home.
The cat, meanwhile, has gone.
Bounding wildly over long-abandoned land,
it has no memory of dog or stone.
Jane Lovell lives in Rugby, Warwickshire. Her poems, which have been published in a range of journals including Agenda, Poetry Wales and Myslexia, focus on our relationship with nature, from a flea wearing tiny jewelled boots created by a Russian miniaturist to a circus elephant butchered during food shortages in post-war Vienna. Threads of folklore and science run through her work.