Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

And today is Friday, February 28, 2020.

Today's poem is by a poet, an American poet named Ryan Wilson, who was born in 1982.

He works for the Association of Literary, Scholars, Critics, and Writers, and is the editor of Literary Matters, and is an award-winning poet.

His first collection of poetry is called The Stranger World, and it came out in 2017.

His work has been published all over the place from the Hopkins Review to New Criterion to First Things, to the Sawani Review, the Yale Review, many other places.

And his book, The Stranger World, won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize in 2017.

I highly recommend you check him out, especially if you like poetry with a formal bent.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is from that book, The Stranger World, and it's called for a

dog. It goes like this.

You'd wake us up, that shrill, insistent bark driving away whatever dreams had fogged our vision,

and we'd rise in the true dark, wondering just what exactly catalogued by canine instinct under threat was there.

What jogger, cat, or dog it was that dogged you from your drows beside the easy chair and summoned your yapped pandemonium.

Nine times in ten it was just empty air. Some ghosted scent, you sniffed. Dumb. You were dumb,

like all dogs snuffling up to snakes, afraid of mice. When we said, come, you wouldn't come.

You capered when commanded to play dead, and when we wanted most to be alone, you'd offer up that imbecilic head until we crowned your pity with a bone.

Our lives took on the shape you spun from need, the harried rondeur of routine.

You gone, the house is quieter, and we've been freed forever from the never-ending chores,

"'your tail entailed, the scrubbing where you peed,

"'the hunting stain removers down in stores.

"'What's hardest are the peaceful hours

"'we wanted so much when you were scratching up the doors

...