At the risk of sounding like Billy Bob Thornton rambling towards an obscure pittance of irony, I want to start by mentioning that I test-drove a truck yesterday. I’ve never owned a truck, and am not the sort of guy you’d expect would want to own a truck. That’s another story.
This truck was on the discount lot of my local repair shop, and it looked as if it would smell thoroughly of cigarettes, for I could see through the locked door windows that the upholstery was marred and speckled with black ash burns. Once I got the key from the owner, I found it smelled like dog. In fact, it smelled like my dog, Deckard (RIP 2008). Deckard suffered from a skin disease the last few years of his life, and it caused him to reek. The smell of this truck cab was of a similar tone, and every bit as nauseating; it was somewhere between a sinus infection and drowned earthworms, with that unmistakable canine bouquet. Part of me wanted to roll the windows down. Part of me wanted to remember. By the time I got on the highway, the practical part of me left the windows up so I could better listen to the workings of the car.
On the surface this has almost nothing to do with Stephen Dunn’s poem “Dog Weather”. And I admit Mr. Dunn is not a favorite poet of mine, though I find his works extremely accessible, and the general mood of many of his poems matches my own. Perhaps too closely. Perhaps that is why he is not a favorite poet of mine.
Dog Weather by Stephen Dunn From Different Ones, 2000 Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up. The paper boy's papers came apart in the wind. Now, nothing human moving. Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart in The Caine Mutiny. My breath chalks the window gives me away to myself. I like the intelligibility of old songs I prefer yesterday. Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back smudged with skid. It's potholed and cracked: it's no damn good. Anyone out without the excuse of a dog should be handcuffed and searched for loneliness. My hair is thinning. I feel like tossing the wind a stick. The promised snow has arrived, heavy, wet. I remember the blizzard of... People I don't want to be speak like that. I close my eyes and one of my many unborn sons makes a snowball and lofts it at an unborn friend. They've sent me an AARP card. I'm on their list. I can be discounted now almost anywhere.
So this poem is cleanly written, fairly clever, though perhaps a bit shallow, a little oto confessional for some readers taste. Yes, the form and style is the sort of “denatured” prose-as-poetry that Joan Houlihan complains about, and the punch line is no great epiphany (Growing Old Is Universal, No Good).
But I thought of this poem when I sat in the cab of that old, foul-smelling truck, perhaps merely through a simple association of the title with dog. It was buoyed in my mind as I struggled with the truck’s broken parking brake lever and I remembered doing the same to my grandfather’s old truck when I lived and worked with him in California as an adolescent. This took me to another summer job I held, working at a video rental shop that specialized in classic American cinema, which took me full circle to The Caine Mutiny, a film that I took home from the sane video shop eighteen years ago. This is a movie that revealed a very different Bogey from the two-dimensional hero of Casablanca, and was one of the first films I watched that summer that tindered my persistent obsession with classic American cinema.
“Dog Weather”, or rather, this occurrence, forced me to conclude that though my reasoning mind may refute a poem’s quality based on philosophy or a theory of aesthetics, I will allow–no, I will not deny that a significant testimonial for a poem’s success is retention in the reader’s mind. In this case I’d read Dunn’s “Dog Weather” just once, and probably years ago. I may have been amused by it, but it had not struck me as a poetic treasure, and so I imagine it sinking even then deep into the sucking gumbo swamp of my memory. But to have it rise up, washed in the rain of nostalgia, glinting somewhat in the sunshine of a much later, much different day gave me something like hope in being alive, and something like faith in reading poetry.
