will miss her dog.

Tomorrow they are going to put down my dog Brittain. I love him so much. I will miss him so much. He was my first dog; we got him when I was 16. Now, ten years later, he is dying of cancer. I won't get to see him before he goes. Home just won't be the same without him barking at anything that moved. I won't have to step over him on the stairs anymore. I won't feel his nose on my knees when I am eating dinner and he wants some too. But he won't have to suffer anymore. I love you Britty. In your memory, here are two poems:

Percy

Your friend is coming I say
to Percy, and name a name

and he turns to the door, his
wide mouth in its laugh-shape,

and waves, since he has one, his tail.
Emerson, I am trying to live,

as you said we must, the examined life.
But there are days I wish

there was less in my head to examine,
not to speak of the busy heart. How

would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not
thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

Mary Oliver

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

Billy Collins

Brittain Duke of Chessington
January 13, 1998-May, 2 2008