Somethings are unchangeably wild, others are stolid tame. In theĬar, when we are getting close to home and the smell of the oceanīegins to surround them, they both sit bolt upright and hum. Sure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment. They both bark rapturouslyĪnd in support of each other. Their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries The brotherliness of the two, Ben andīear, increases with each year. He was meant to be idleĪnd pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp Though I hear nothing.īear is small and white with a curly tail. Look up as the bird floats by, and I suppose the field mouse hears Wings and drifts moth-like over the grass. Sit there inventing his catty racket, except when he opens pale Owl, at wood’s edge, in one of the tall pines. I follow them to the end of the field where I hear the long-eared A soft wind, like a belt of silk, wraps the house. Tonight Ben charges up the yard Bear follows. Music of smell, that we know so little about. Into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyesĪs if listening. I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.” They cannot make us sweeter or more kind. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. The other dog-the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk-is what a chair is to a tree. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.

For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. “But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit.

Mary oliver best dog poem