Early Bird Dog Training — Blackbird Archive

← v10n1, Spring 2011

July day walking Finn number two, headstrong

pup who makes my arm twitch with fatigue, the pronged

stick I tap for stress hot incentive to him.

Ten months now, he hears every bird the same.

His heart boils, and soon his tongue lolls sidewise.

I don’t know his limits, so leash his desire’s

worst, though he bucks and huffs and whines. Heel, heel,

I bark, acolytes metering a suburb’s field

until he’s caught by a goldfinch. Is this it?—wild

canary, butterfly yellow, that flits, scolds,

seaming the beaten path with beauty’s signal.

How bold, notes from a hidden branch that trembles!

Yet I can’t find the nesting tree, nor can dog,

who, unmoved by form, points not song but log.

animals rural-life

Dave Smith

Dave Smith is the author of Looking Up: Poems, 2010–2020 (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press), Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005–2010 (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992–2004 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). He is also the author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Smith retired as co-editor of The Southern Review and Boyd Professor of English in 2002 at Louisiana State University. He then became the Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry and Chairman of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, from which he retired in 2013.