What If the Symbol Were a Puppy?, Tinka and the Magic Beans, & Needing Feed

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Tricia Knoll

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What If the Symbol Were A Puppy?

The puppy promised
its only life
to comfort, heal
to the end of each day,
attending even night screams.

What if it were taught with patience
not to bite or make war on heels and fingers
for a reward that offers love,
a chance to lick the feet
of others clean of road dirt
while we are herded
toward compassion.

What if we took vows
to care for each other
for life, to love despite
indiscretions, misbehaviors,
or indigestions of chicken feet?
To come to an end gently,
slumping down to inevitability
without judgment or remorse.

What if it were a puppy
instead of a lamb?

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Tinka and the Magic Beans

Neighbors all knew Eddie and Tinka,
his West Highland Terrier.
He spent hours smoking cigars
on a bench in his small backyard,
framed in a trumpet vine that curled
to the gutters. Alone after his wife died.
He told stories about his childhood
picking watercress up the hill
near a stream now culverted,
greens for his family, poor and large.

In September Tinka was gone.
His magic beans withered.
That winter Eddie sat in his bathtub
and shot his brains out. My daughter
and I remember well Eddie and the magic beans.

They were outside every summer.
Eddie was old; Tinka got to be 22,
mostly hairless, and dotted
with red sores. Blind. Deaf.
Eddie carried her down
the stairs. She couldn’t squat.
We debated the dog-year myth
of 7 to 1, wondered what the smell
of cigar and dog decay was like
inside his house.

Every June Eddie planted beans,
saved seed of scarlet runner beans
his wife started decades earlier.
He handed out those beans to our kids.
Hot pink and bright purple when shelled –
before they went black with purple
polka-dots as they dried. We called
them Eddie’s magic beans.

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Needing Feed

I wished that the orange tractor decorated with holiday lights across the parking lot was really a sleigh drawn by two draft horses festooned with bronze bells when I tripped the electric eye that opened the left-hand door of the pet store. From the first step in, the smell was fetid. A ferret habitat installed next to where people stomp the snow off their boots. I ignore the ferrets on the false theory of No see ‘em, no smell ‘em as I remember the teenage girl who put her ferret in a cigar box rigged to a zipline and sent him sailing. I go pas cat climbers whose third stories feature a round hole an owl might like. Avoid display of kitty whiffle balls with bells in them that invariably roll under a couch. Ditto fake mice with feathers. Cat litters promise no odors and compact clumping. Skip cats:  I’m of the dog clan – on my way to the maze of dog kibble made of chicken, beef, venison, salmon, bits of spleen and liver. Thankful this store doesn’t sell box turtles. I spent three months buying crickets and strawberries for a third-grade classroom turtle named Count Turt who needed a refuge for a summer vacation. Full stop at parakeets, tropical light yellows and blues on a winter day. Cheery-busy despite breeding mills and avian flu. I once read a murder mystery whose detective strategized with her budgie on how to locate the missing corpse. Pass dog chew toys: slivers of elk antler and twisted lengths of bull penis marketed as bully sticks. I need training treats – low calorie, tasty morsels–and kibble. Come, good dog. Come again, come to my hand. I close my eyes to the fading smell of ferret. Light-headed as if the dried out, baked down flesh of creatures in bags on shelves reconstitutes. Rewilds. Bull. Wild elk. Newborn lamb. Free-flowing river in spawning season. Howls of wolves and coyotes. I have no idea how my vegetarian friend shops here for her Maine coon cat. My dogs like carrots. 

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Tricia Knoll has lived with dogs, either one or two at a time, for nearly 60 years. They show up in her poetry along with the trees, histories, fantasies and more that weave into her poetry which is widely published in journals and anthologies. Nine collections are in print either as chapbooks or full-length books. Knoll is a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com

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