"For My Dog, Who Listens to All My Poems"

I am finally making progress on my SAMLA paper. I'm already thinking of one of the final steps before any conference: the multiple practice readings I'll perform for my always-captive-at-home audience, Bing and Wes. For as long as I've been going to conferences, this has been my ritual: a at least few days before the conference, I'll print out a copy of the paper, set the timer on the microwave, plop down on the kitchen floor and start reading. The oddness of this situation--I don't normally sit on the kitchen floor (and I don't know why I originally picked this location), and I don't often talk uninterrupted for 15-20 minutes to an invisible audience--always draws Bing and Wesley to the scene. They watch, pretty darn captivated, sometimes meowing at me as if to say, "Are you talking to us? 'Cause we're right here..."

So I am reminded of this poem by Cathy Smith Bowers, which Andrew Sullivan recently linked to on his blog.

How entranced, each time, she sits there,
her eyes, I swear,
filling with tears
at her master's

inimitable brilliance. It's
clear to me what's
bounding through her
head: The greatest,

yet, of all the generations!
My husband says
she's just waiting
for her rations.

Bing and Wes aren't quite this earnest (well, Wesley might be while Bing might just indeed be "waiting for his rations"), but God bless 'em, they really do seem to listen with something that looks a heck of a lot like interest and (sometimes) appreciation. Yes, I know that's not really what's going on, but it's awfully nice to imagine that it might be.