Dog Watching the Waves
Aldeburgh, 2011
Long-eared and scruffy, he’s mesmerised by the waves scampering towards him like rabbits instantly sucked back into a calm that falls over the edge to water another world, a better world perhaps, and blessing that world with fallen boats and a sun that visits each day before dropping over their horizon to the next world and the next – like a scone tumbling off the top of a many tiered cake stand, thinks the dog lost in Victoriana, untaught, primitive, the sky grey and the grey waves writing the ocean as the dog could write a poem about gull sounds and the sounds of our voices riding the breeze to enlighten the next world about the dog we’re taking pictures of, an animal just like us, who rarely gets it right – the slant of things, the dropping off of things – until one day we’ll die as lovers torn apart: the me who is adoring a dog among friends will be wrenched from the me who is thinking, I am adoring this dog – my narrator, my wide-awake, who says, sweeter than anything, I’ll miss you when we’re gone because whatever it is that we will die into will be worse than rabbits slipping off one world into the next so that we may never see the beach grow empty and quiet with someone realising, hey, the dog’s not a poet but a poor lost dog, as we are all on some level strays for whom the sea carries not marvels but remembered sounds of our mothers’ panting breaths.
Jeri Onitskansky is a Jungian analyst and poet based in High Barnet. She won first prize in the 2012 Ledbury poetry competition and publishes regularly in Poetry Review.