I'm Adeline Mone and this is The Slowdown.

There is very little that makes a dog happier than finding something dead to roll in or eat.

It's the nasty fact about my sweet canine companion that I'd rather not discuss, but it's true.

There is the way I know exactly what is about to happen when I see her tail wag.

Her eyes get wide and then the right shoulder goes down and before I can do anything,

my dog is all four paws in the air, wriggling and shimming on some dead thing in a field or in the road.

The triumph of a dog that has rolled in something dead or one that comes back with something

hanging from their mouth is unparalleled. Why are they interested in that deep stink,

the utterly horrific funk that a decaying thing emits as Elizabeth Bishop wrote how unlikely.

My dog does love peanut butter and the smell of bacon, so why then would she also love the

odorous bile of decomposing flesh just as much or even more, but oh how she loves it and the

more it disgusts me, the more she revels in it. I've had to bathe her vigorously at arms length

for fear of even getting the smell on my sleeves. I try to explain to her that in the human world,

we do what we can to avoid death. We even try to make it pretty, keep it sterile and far from the

census. I hit a friend once who worked at a mortuary in New Jersey and did the makeup for the dead.

She would talk about the experience in detail the way the flesh would react and the art of it,

the respect she felt. She made it sound beautiful, but it also sounded so far away from what we

experience on a typical basis with our dead. We send our dead into rooms to get boxed up or burned

and it doesn't feel like a body at all, but more like a series of legal requirements and paperwork.

I too want to keep death at bay, my own and the death of everyone else I love, as Franco Hera wrote,

no more dying. Today's poem observes a dog and it's dead thing. I love how this poem starts with

the puppy, but ends with a larger wonder about death and our separation from it.

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