People and Their Pets

People and their pets
beget a mystery.
That so few regrets
attend their history

can’t not confound.
Why do all these alien
duets abound –
amid the piss and feces,

shedding, scratches, bites,
expensive visits to the vet?
That we set to rights
the traumas that beset

both stewardee and steward
in the propagation
of our blunt untoward
miscegenation

(so to speak)

begins to want to leak for me
into a looser rhyme and meter scheme:
better to suggest – account
for – our affection, predilection

for each other. One needn’t have
a human sister, father, brother,
mother, lover to be close to something
else to love that breathes. And so we

stroke their pelts and they regard us
as necessities – and we leave
unresolved our interspecies mysteries:
let them spill and splay, like puppy play.





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