POEMS/ On Seeing a Plaster Cast of a Dog in Pompeii 

On Seeing a Plaster Cast of a Dog in Pompeii

Now he lies on his back,
legs stretched up, mouth
gasping for his final breath,
killed in an instant
by a pyroclastic surge,
frozen and decomposing
for centuries in hardened ash
until only his hollow shape
remained for Fiorelli to cast
in poured plaster.

Chained to the threshold
when the lava came, he was left
to guard an empty house
as the others fled.
But that morning, I like to think,
he trotted out the door
down the polished stones
of the narrow street to find
a butcher’s bone, a crust
the baker threw into the alley
or a hunk of cheese whose mold
could be ignored, that he
moved freely with the purpose
of any dog going about
the usual business of his life
and did not know he had fetched his last
stick, had barked for the last
time at the stranger at his door.



This poem appears in Migrations (Antrim House, 2013)

---