Poem Written in a Café After Reading an Article
About How to Sit in a Cafe and Write a Poem
for New Yorker Magazine and Ignoring It

Four terrace tables over
A dog wears a collar,
Though not a dog collar.
He wears a high white plastic collar,
For he has been injured
In an auto accident: non-fatal.
He is a chihuahua.
I do not know how many lives a chihuahua has,
        do you?

He sits like the chihuahua he is, sits in the lap
Of his owner who is clearly a lawyer.
A lawyer-woman-attorney with dark sunglasses
Who evokes in me pity
For the person or persons whose ass or asses
Will no longer be attached when she finishes
        suing them off.

Though ruthless, I think she is not cruel.
She has not forgotten how to laugh.
She laughs now behind her winedark sunglasses
As she kisses her chihuahua's head over and over
And the chihuahua is loving it
In its strange chihuahua-love way.

She seems a kind of Cruella Deville alter ego.
Cruella wanted to make a luxurious coat
Out of dalmation skins.  Chihuahua lawyer
Wants to skin alive any human who does not
Love and respect her dog.

I remain very, very quiet for many times
I have daydreamed of drop-kicking a yapping chihuahua
Very hard over a very high fence.

The drop-kick, you may recall,
Was a popular football surprise maneuver many years ago.
Now though, it has become, like many people and things,
Archaic, esoteric, and possibly obsolete.

Is something fundamental missing from her life
For which the dog is a futile attempt at compensation?
Or is it us, the huge mass of poor chihuahualess fools
Who have missed the open secret
Of filling the voids of life so simply?

But, my mind digresses.
They are, clearly, happy, the lady attorney,
And her little dog too.
Also, they will be rich.

But, they do not look up at the homing pigeons
Whose owner releases them into Brooklyn
Everyday as the sun goes down.

They circle their wings in and out of the sun,
Their wings become suns, they circle a farther arc,
Their bodies are suns,
The chihuahua does not see, the lawyer wears
Sunglasses too dark for the climate,
The sky is the low blue of a late day of early fall
The sky holds the pigeons to its heart,
The sky says "Pigeons, now you are become my heart...
Ahhh, so this is how a heart soars,
This is what they mean!...
Hey, look, look up lady with a dog, this is what they mean...

No, no wait, don't look,
Hold on a second, is this, does anyone know,
Is this kind of thing legal,
I mean, I've seen so many changes,
Meaning no offense...

Do you know of any laws?"

Don Pomerantz ' poems have appeared in Failbetter, Eclectica, Stylus Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.  He came to New York City from Western Massachusetts in the early 90s, more or less trading nature for possibility.  He spends his days as a special education teacher on the Lower East Side making his everyday life a bit of an adventure within an adventure.  He is happily attached to Barbara Feinman, semi-famous East Village milliner.

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Keywords : love, pets,

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