Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2024
Walking Memory, poems in Charlie Brice.
Walking Memory
I loved watching her tushie wiggle on our walks
down Maple Avenue, loved how she’d stop
a few feet before the intersection, look at me
with those deep brown pools, wondering whether
we would cross the street or round the corner.
When we crossed, she heeled, kept close as I’d
taught her, so she wouldn’t wander into traffic.
Sometimes, on midnight walks, she flushed a deer.
They’d stand almost nose to nose, dog and deer,
astonished at the presence of the other. Usually
the deer jumped first, her bounding tail visible
in the moonlight. Mugsi, unfrozen, would
yank her leash, forget about me, and yelp
like a drunken banshee. Once home she lay on
her back and I’d pet her tummy, our pace of life
slowed by the peace my hand found there. I’d
watch her pink tongue lick her lips in rhythmic
contentment—comfort for us both.
When the time came, she met the Vet
at the front door, tail wagging. She always
loved visitors. And when the injection began
her pink tongue shot out through her lips.
“That happens,” the Vet said. “It’s okay.”
I know that others have suffered, have lost like
I have. Matthew Arnold mourned, “That loving
heart, that patient soul.” Browning lost her
“loving friend,” her “gentle fellow-creature.”
Updike lamented that, “surrounded by love
that would have upheld her, nevertheless she
sank and, stiffening, disappeared.” I looked
to their words for consolation—there was none.
I can no longer pet my dog. I’m tired
of all that “crossed the rainbow” crap.
Mugsi’s ashes are in a black box on my dining room
table. I’m unable to move the box, but I have tried
to pet it. It was like petting a box with my dog’s
ashes in it. I found her leash. It was like
trying to take a memory for a walk.
Louise
Louise was the smartest person I knew at
the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Her
face, wrinkled already, belonged on a forty-
year-old, her body that of a spinster in a
Tennessee Williams play, hair coarse as steel
wool, her complexion moribund, corpselike.
There had to be someone who wouldn’t find
love in this life, someone who only washed
one cup, one plate, after dinner, someone who
reached across the lonely sheets in the morning
to find no one there.
We shared a love of Thomas Hardy and Allen Ginsberg.
She visited me in my tiny room on 10th street. We talked
about Casterbridge, Tess, and the obscurity of Jude. We
drank cheap Ratskeller wine, and toasted those best minds
that Allen lost along the way. Louise lay on my bed, her
hands behind her head, and gave me the look. She wanted
something I could not give her. The thought of sex
with her was repulsive to me, a total turn-off. I wished
I could have achieved an erection while thinking about
her soul. Her soul was exquisite, the most sparkling jewel.
Descartes could doubt the existence of everything but
his mind—psyché in Greek—also soul. I failed to doubt
my body. She hung on in English class for a month, then
hopped into her beige Mustang and drove out of my life.
Forty years later, out of the blue, an email from her
in my inbox. Louise: wife, mother, grandmother—
she loads dish after dish into her dishwasher, and in
the morning, loving hands help her make the bed.
The Title
© Charlie Brice
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Miracles That Keep Me Going (WordTech Editions, 2023). His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere.