The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2009

Howl

for Solo

I saw the best dogs of my generation destroyed by madness, barking hysterical,

dragging their tails through alleys at dawn looking

for an angry bone,

floppy-eared dogsters laughing with waking nightmares their brains to Heaven,

who ran onto middle school grounds and into classrooms

to be locked in a closet by the principal,

who ate used kleenex in tenement hotels and drank toilet water

in the Tenderloin,

who were chained to willow trees in Fremont

and locked in steel cages in Moraga,

who backseat slept continuously seventy hours from

Denver to the Truckee River to

the Bay Bridge,

a lost nation of slobbering artists jumping onto couches and out of trucks and to the moon,

who peed on leaflets in Union Square scattering their urine freely, while the sirens of Los Alamos peed on them,

and they peed on the Wall,

and the ferry to Sausalito also peed,

who bit detectives in the leg and shrieked with delight in

policecars for committing no crime but their own dogitude,

who let themselves be sniffed in the ass by saintly Rottweilers,

and screamed with joy,

who played ball in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and

the grass of public parks and cemeteries,

dropping dripping tennis balls on the shoes of

complete strangers,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to up their cookies but wound up without testicles

when the blonde & naked veterinarian came at them with a knife,

who stuck their noses into the snatches of a million girls, tunneling

eagerly under the skirt at a wedding in Oakland,

who sat with their litter in a box by the river, free puppies,

their eyes unopened,

who ate potato salad from de Young Museum garbage cans and subsequently presented themselves at the loading

dock of the SPCA with mangy coats and sickly

barking, demanding to be destroyed as

a public nuisance,

who instead were issued a cinderblock universe of obedience

training house training Seeing Eye Dog training,

who overturned only one symbolic garbage can in protest, then lay

down to eat grass,

with the back fence finally mended, the garbage cans lids locked

down tightly, the neighbors no longer leaving keys in

the ignition,

ah, Solo, if you are not running around, I am not running around, and now you're in the vegetable soup of time,

the pale mailman of death coming to beat the years out of the water

dish and rain mail like filthy pictures throughout

the house,

with the last trace of the wagging tail out of their furry rib cages like

the thrownaway newspapers of eternity.

John Hutton