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Column 642

Death of a Dog

Intro by Ted Kooser
07.09.2017

There are three and a half mil­lion of you read­ing this col­umn in print and on-line, and I appre­ci­ate every one of you. I want to take advan­tage of your atten­tion to pass along the news of the death of my dear old yel­low Lab, Howard, at age fif­teen, in the hope that a few of you will join me in wish­ing him well on his trip to the stars. Here’s how it has felt, to me, to lose my good friend. 

Death of a Dog

The next morning I felt that our house
had been lifted away from its foundation
during the night, and was now adrift,
though so heavy it drew a foot or more
of whatever was buoying it up, not water
but something cold and thin and clear,
silence riffling its surface as the house
began to turn on a strengthening current,
leaving, taking my wife and me with it,
and though it had never occurred
to me until that moment, for fifteen years
our dog had held down what we had
by pressing his belly to the floors,
his front paws, too, and with him gone
the house had begun to float out onto
emptiness, no solid ground in sight.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2017 by Ted Kooser. Poem reprinted by permission of Ted Kooser. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.