The Poet Needs a Puppy

by Cynthia Knorr

Abusers, destroyers, adulterers, addicts,
no one is up to anything good in her poems.
The poet needs a puppy to take her mind away
from hydrogen bombs, poisonous spiders,
black rhinos rising from an African pond
to crush a tourist camp, leaving nothing behind
but a broken chair and a leg bone.
What kind of tortured place is the mind
that spews forth this chaos?
If there was a puppy, it might climb onto the keyboard
and direct the poet’s fingers to sunnier places—
a picnic in the meadow, not the basement
where an innocent child is beaten, not the living room
where mother sits on the floor and drinks whiskey
because father gambled away the living room furniture.
Maybe the poet is trapped in a failing marriage,
agoraphobic, friendless.  Or was it something
that happened in the way back, the place
where memory cells keep their fodder wrapped
and resistant to retrieval but still able, like a wizard
behind a curtain, to cause mayhem in the here and now.
Whatever.  The poet will write what the poet will write.
I don’t have to read it.  Besides which,
she already has a puppy that sits beside her as we speak,
licks her on the lips, and eats a biscuit.