My puppy was born in November, so much of her early life took place in winter. She loves cold weather and snow. When she saw the snow falling today, she became a canine exclamation point, jumping and barking joyfully, sniffing the air and rooting in piles of leaves.
Billy Collins contemplates the wild world . . .
Animal Behavior
by: Billy Collins
Among the animals who avoid danger
just by being still,
the heron is a favorite example,
indistinguishable from the reeds
he stands in, thin and gray, at the water's edge.
Then there is the snowy egret
who must think he can make
his white question mark of a body
just vanish from the lake
by being as motionless as can be.
And when it comes to people
there's the quiet man at the bar
who lifts his eyes only now and then
as well as the girl in the summer dress
who must pretend she is not here.
And who am I to talk,
the last flamingo to leave the party,
good at avoiding danger so far,
away from any cove or shore,
conspicuous as the drink I carry out the door.
This evening, a group of friends came to my house to have dinner and play games. It was a lovely way to end a pretty busy day. We ate pizza, told jokes and stories, and enjoyed being together. It didn't matter who won or who lost, and the subject of politics never came up.
For a few hours, life seemed . . . normal. I wasn't worrying about weird cabinet appointments or the idea of a malignant narcissist having access to the nuclear codes of the United States. Instead, we were like the herons or snowy egrets in Collins's poem, standing at the water's edge, just grateful to be quietly alive.
In the coming months/years, I think nights like this are going to be very important. The human animal craves friendship. Needs to feel not alone, even introverts like myself. (Yes, I am an introvert. Most poets are.) We all need to be reminded that there are good, kind people in this fractured time.
And we need puppies and herons and egrets to remind ourselves that this world doesn't belong to us, and we don't get to fuck it up for our fellow animals.
By the way, Saint Marty didn't win a single game tonight. Not that he was keeping score.
