That Part in the Music
Once loyal to a cruel master,
the dog moves like a man who
not so long ago weighed a lot less
and is still figuring the difference,
what if anything to make of it.
It doesn’t matter, whatever
tenderness she’s known since;
the dog, I mean. They’re called
hesitation wounds, the marks
left where the hand, having meant
to do harm, started to, then
reconsidered. As if a hand
could reconsider. The dog
wants to trust, you can see it
in her eyes, like that part in the music
where it still sounds like snow
used to. There were orchards, still;
meadows. She’ll never be free.
Copyright © 2024 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I adopted—rescued—a dog almost two years ago, who’d been very badly abused, was maybe thirty pounds underweight, and was found with chains around her neck. She’d somehow broken free and was stray for some time, unable to eat much because someone had shaved all her teeth down to her gums. That dog, Emily, is doing great now and is very happy. But I still see the tug of war in her eyes, between trusting and not trusting, between love and fear. It’s like I’m looking straight into my own eyes.”
—Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips’ most recent books are Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). His numerous honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets and Writers, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. Phillips served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2011. He is currently a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.