When it was clear I would never catch her
and that she would never escape my pursuit,
Zeus intervened and turned each of us to stone.
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When it was clear I would never catch her
and that she would never escape my pursuit,
Zeus intervened and turned each of us to stone.
No longer was ardor our fate. No longer
were days marked by bramble giving way to bog,
by razory reeds that cut our swift passing.
Days when all I saw of her was airborne,
arrowy--a silvery shimmer and flash of scut.
And gone, too, the late night stillness
when I’d pause, not thinking to lose her,
but hoping, ahead of my silence,
she’d slow down and turning, see,
snout up, tongue lively, lightly panting,
undiscouraged, how at the edge of our distance
I stood, wishing she’d invite my approach.
But these are dog thoughts and I was god’s
hound by way of Europa, Minos, and Procris,
so much passing on of love’s troubles
I was meant to end. Who wouldn’t want to die
into monumental stillness? Who wouldn’t want
to be frozen in their last untaken step, translated,
like we were—my pointer’s stance, her backward
glance—in the vast sky, where the gods below
had safely placed us?
© by Michael Collier. Printed by permission of the author.
Michael Collier’s sixth book of poems, An Individual History, will appear in 2012 with W.W. Norton. In 2009, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland and is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Arts & Academe‘s poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: Michael Collier writes a lot about dogs. In “A Real-Life Drama,” for example, a family pet who slaughters a pedigree rabbit reveals “the dark corner of his nature.” A chimerical pseudo Hillary Clinton figure “wraps his legs around Trotsky’s leg and humps like a dog” in “All Souls.” Collier’s elegant essay tribute to William Maxwell (from A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations, edited by Collier along with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch) is entitled “The Dog Gets to Dover: William Maxwell as a Correspondent.” Nor is Collier alone in penning poems about Canis lupus familiaris; a quick Google search for “dog poems” yielded 4,590,000 results in 0.11 seconds, including work by W. S. Merwin, Mark Doty, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephen Dobyns, and Robert Burns. Amazon.com lists 1,669 titles in the category of “dog poetry,” including the popular Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs, edited by Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard.
Collier is also a poet whose passion for and insight into classical mythology often provide a discerning and provocative context for quotidian drama in his poems (Collier has done an acclaimed translation of Medea for Oxford University Press, as well). It makes sense, then, given these propensities, that he should turn his imagination to mythical canines (and there are no shortage of these either—not poems about mythical dogs, but dogs in myth—with Wikipedia offering 51 pages for “mythological dogs”). The mezzo-soprano and composer Judith Cloud has, in fact, set three of Collier’s mythological dog poems to music: “Argos,” “Cerberus,” and “Laelaps,” the latter published here for the first time.
One of the pleasures for lyric poets working with extant myth is that the “story” is already implied and understood, freeing the poet to work in the interstices, to delve imaginatively and musically into and beyond what the stock narrative offers, and to use the existing tale as a starting point for personal and extra-mythological meditation. And Collier suggests from stanza one, in which he gives the gist and outcome of the Laelaps story in three deft lines, that his interest is not so much in plot as in the “so what?” of what went down, the resonance and aftermath.
There are many spins on the Laelaps myth, but common to most versions is the siccing of Laelaps (whose name translates into something like “storm wind,” and who was known to be the fastest of all dogs, capable of catching anything) on the Teumessian fox, a gigantic fox destined never to be caught. Zeus, perplexed and frustrated by the paradox of this perpetual chase, throws in the towel, intervening, as Collier puts it, and turning both animals “to stone.”
After summarizing the myth in the first tercet, Collier, whose narrator is Laelaps, devotes four electric stanzas to what he calls “dog thoughts.” Zeus may have put an end to the chase (“no longer was ardor our fate”), but it’s clear that Laelaps loved the pursuit, the hope, the being in it, the “days marked by bramble giving way to bog, / by razory reeds that cut our swift passing.” The sexual tension and anticipation (deeply human, I might add, and mortal) is unmistakable:
Days when all I saw of her was airborne,
arrowy – a silvery shimmer and flash of scut.
And gone, too, the late night stillness
when I’d pause, not thinking to lose her,
but hoping, ahead of my silence,
she’d slow down and turning, see,
snout up, tongue lively, lightly panting,
undiscouraged, how at the edge of our distance
I stood, wishing she’d invite my approach.
Laelaps’s resigned acknowledgment that he is “god’s / hound by way of Europa, Minos, and Procris, / so much passing on of love’s troubles // I was meant to end” is tinged with regret. (I especially admire the way Collier enjambs and breaks his stanza so that “I was meant to end” not only refers back to the chain of badly behaved gods and their consorts whose erotic problems he—passed and gifted from hand to hand—was meant to allay, but also to the fate of any plaything of the gods: We are meant to end.) Resignation deepens into a kind of tender irony with the poem’s concluding questions:
Who wouldn’t want to die
into monumental stillness? Who wouldn’t want
to be frozen in their last untaken step, translated,
like we were—my pointer’s stance, her backward
glance—in the vast sky, where the gods below
had safely placed us?
Clearly Collier here is evoking Keats, who grappled in his famous “Ode to a Grecian Urn” with similar questions: Which is better, to be caught up in the frustrations and thrall of the mortal coil or to be “frozen” and immortalized through death/art? But Collier has another point to make, as well. By positioning the gods below, gazing up at the stars into which Laelaps and the fox have been transformed (at least one version of the myth has Zeus turning Laelaps into the star that we know as Canis Major), he puts the immortals in the position of mortals, looking heavenward. Perhaps this suggests that the gods muck around with mortals and then end things in order to themselves feel more like them. Or, rather, Collier’s Laelaps, captured forever in his “last untaken step,” indicates that this is one way religion, myth, and art are perpetuated, even needed—we take what can’t be understood or resolved and turn it into something monumental, sublime, and seemingly arrested so that we can ponder and petition its mystery. In Collier’s poem, animal ardor—desire, velocity, instinct (the animal in us)—is the real mystery, made all the more so knowing it is “meant to end.”
(Image derived from a photo by Flickr user chefranden)
