Piper Goes Blind Aged Eight
The new reality—our dog is blind—
has struck us like a rock thrown at a pane
of glass. We once saw clearly. Now we find
ourselves in darkness. We have got to train
her, fix the layout, keep things off the floor,
teach her words like left, right, up and down.
We miss the carefree pup she was before,
her countenance more bright-eyed smile than frown.
And yet, the vets have said that we will know
a different closeness with our little girl.
Her new reliance on us makes her curl
up closer, look much sadder when we go.
We’re patient with her, accept her need to fuss.
Our love is steadfast as her trust in us.
*
Orion Blesses My Blind Dog
Now that my dog is blind, she often rises
unsteadily from the bed at four a.m.
and wanders, groggily crashing into things,
searching for an exit from the dark.
My job is to surface from my dream,
get up quickly, hustle into clothes,
and lead her, with my voice and finger snaps
down the stairs and out the kitchen door.
The night, then, is vast and otherworldly,
our footfalls crunching through the new-formed frost.
She scampers around, gratefully harvesting smells
as Orion looks on, clear and benevolent.
Afterward, she settles back in bed,
her little body warm against my own,
and I lie there, half-awake in the shadows,
dazzled by a love as pure as stars.
*
Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches poetry at West Windsor Art Center and English at Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014). Her new collection, States of Grace, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in the fall of 2024. She is the Board President of the Poetry by the Sea Conference, an annual 4-day conference which takes place in Madison, CT, and the editor of the online poetry journal for women formalists, Mezzo Cammin.
