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This
is an old dog, sighing and dreaming, in a poem stripped free of
politically correct bigotry, and she is in our faces. She
longs for that blasting sound—and a mouthful of feathers as tactile
and tasting of mercilessness as Wilbur’s “Barred Owl” eating something
raw. With that visceral power, Diktynna appears again, as
Thea (goddess) of a hunt, and dreaming of “Dog Heaven”:
Sprawled
in the pickup box,
my old
bitch is half-dead.
Her slashed
teat needs stitches,
her nettled
nose twitches,
and nine
gutted pheasant cocks
pillow
her dreaming head.
This
has all the power and terror of that bloody moment in The Odyssey
when Telemachus goes to hack to death the twelve lecherous serving
maids with his sword, but thinks better of it…and hangs them from
a hasty gibbet. The great moment in Murphy’s poem is that
unwritten-but-utterly-necessary pause the line before compels from
us: “…and nine gutted pheasant cocks….” Elemental and
startling. Murphy adds an elegy for this creature near the
end of Ploughshare, a poem of six (!) lines. It is
as brilliant as anything by Landor in epigram, and I can think of
no higher praise. I defy anyone to read it and not be shaken.
Homer would have understood it perfectly.
I
have gone on at some length about Diktynna in order to be able to
keep my praise for this book under control as I quote from a poem
mentioned earlier, “The Blind.” Inexplicably, the flap copy
sees humor in the very lines I wish to quote, and I suppose that
might be at least one possible quality they possess—if one were
as tough (and tough-minded) as the individuals in Ploughshare.
But I’ll leave the answer to that question up to the reader:
Father,
the dog, and I
are learning
how to die
with our
feet stuck in the muck
and our
eyes trained on the sky.
Even
the title contributes to an otherworldly pathos here—a deeply moving
and frightening moment. Isolation, separation, love, tenderness,
fear, pity: could Murphy possibly top this? In six lines?
Here's “The Pallbearers” :
At the
prairie cemetery
where the
river meets a road
and Murphys
come to bury
love in
the loam we’ve sowed
my brother
lets me carry
the light
end of the load.
I
cannot read this poem without tears starting up…and neither can
my mother, who, bless her heart, is not exactly a charter member
of The Poetry Book Club. Ohio University Press, bring this
work on—and sell ten million copies.
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