Two Poems
The Dogs
When I think of the dogs I think of the clatter of biscuits in tin bowls,
of chain on corrugated iron. Working dogs live outside and incidentally outside
is what you say when you want them to leave. You say
gettawayback you say
wayleggo
you say come by, come by. Speak up.
Once when I was four you had to tell me the language
you used for dogs was only for them. Like bastard,
like you fucken mongrel.
Words for working dogs, outside.
Dogs like Scrap with his stiff lateral walk. Glen with three legs.
Ruffy, half-blind, brought over by someone down the road
who heard you were a soft touch. Jess, the epileptic.
Misty who arrived terrified, cringing up beside you
with the sad hope in her eyes. Nell who could no longer run
but could bark her harsh Huntaway yell
from the back of the quad bike. Speak up. Nell who ate half
of Misty’s pups in a lean summer.
When I think of the dogs I think of your anger
ringing off the hills. I think of how few times
I have seen you angry at another person. I think of my brother
telling me he saw you beat a sheep to death in the yards
one parched post-divorce spring. I think of the smell of
diesel leaking onto dirt from the old pump and the white fat
of a carcass hanging, ready to feed the dogs.
You say heel.
I say love’s commands
are never so clear.
Kōwaro (Canterbury mudfish, Neochanna burrowsius)
Speckled jelly slips swim in bug-deep pools,
move through the sun-warmed tannin, suspended.
At soft-dark edges where the water cools
they spawn silky in the stillness. How did
a fish learn to breathe through skin? Slow-flow
streams and riverine seep giving way to sprawl
and the green flush of impetus. We grow
like kahikatea, blind to the call
of five hundred blazing summers. In drought
the slick bodies pause, galaxies waiting
under clay. Do kōwaro ever doubt
the autumn, or worry of stagnating,
or, like us, devise new methods to cope,
holding oxygen in their mouths like hope.
Zoë Deans lives in Ōtautahi and works in drug harm reduction. They have poems published or forthcoming in Overcom, bad apple, Dark Mountain, and Tarot.