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Old Dogs (Remember)
You’ve heard the saying. The first day at home,
snub-nosed and sweet, house-trained but otherwise
unbroken, our rescue ignored every trick
in the book—classic commands: sit, stay,
be good, I begged. But as the wisdom goes:
At some point, learning comes too late. The sun
sinks on the dull glare of what used to cut,
bitter and sweet and just out of reach
of memory. Redemption is for those
who remember, and my mother slaps the glasses
off my father’s face, laughing, her sharp edges
blunted into the barking violence of a bully.
Be good holds no water when the night falls,
dripping with the echo of another
she can’t recall. The sound of time running out
sounds a lot like the word they keep asking her,
sounds like something she can almost string
together. Sounds, a little bit, like surrender.
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Diana Cao is a writer and JD candidate at Harvard Law School, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and International Literary Seminars, and her writing has been nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Award and Best New Poets. She is a winner of Nimrod International's 2023 Neruda Prize, and she likes night swims, talking to citrus, and the gloaming.
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No Escape from Within, photo by Tony Luciani of his mother
Sounds. Sounds. What a beautiful mystery in this poem.
Posted by: Bill Nevins | November 26, 2023 at 10:58 AM
This is a splendid poem, holding the speaker’s mother’s darkness up to the light . . . It’s not a sonnet per se, but it turns like one after the double line-break. Nicely done altogether!
Posted by: Thomas O'Grady | November 26, 2023 at 11:39 AM
glorious resonance in every line and the image you chose to go with the poem terence, one of your best posts in your picks of the weeks, and that's saying something, i want more of cao's artistry
Posted by: lally | November 26, 2023 at 11:44 AM
Pain made beautiful
Posted by: Grace Cavalieri | November 26, 2023 at 11:49 AM
Michael: Thanks for the comment.
Posted by: Terence Winch | November 26, 2023 at 11:59 AM
I'm wiser after having just read this very smart poem that's such a treat to the ear. Diana, you showed us something substantial here. Terence, glad to have this poem--thanks!
Posted by: Don Berger | November 26, 2023 at 04:46 PM
Thanks for that comment, my friend.
Posted by: Terence Winch | November 26, 2023 at 05:54 PM
So beautifully controlled and so heartbreaking.
Posted by: Phyllis Rosenzweig | November 27, 2023 at 06:43 PM
“At some point, learning comes too late”: that’s a chilling, credible statement. Diana Cao does a nimble job of unpacking it through her vivid delineation of the behavior of a rescue dog. Her near-analogy of the dog with her mother who “slaps the glasses / off my father’s face, laughing, her sharp edges / blunted into the barking violence of a bully” culminates into something “like surrender” (Cao’s italics). That is both heart-breaking and unmooring. “Redemption is for those / who remember,” but what happens when we can’t or won’t? The answer resides in the only other words Cao italicizes: “Be good.” Can anything be more bluntly basic? What happened to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas urged in his famous villanelle? The answer is cruelly simple: you have to be aware of the dying light to rage against it. Brava, Cao!
Posted by: Dr. Earle Hitchner | December 08, 2023 at 09:28 AM