You and Your Dog

I don't know if it ever occurred to you
that your dog was keeping you alive.

I'm not talking
about your heart or your arteries
or your legs or your lungs.

There was a hill of slate
where you said we could find fossils
so we went scrambling through the stones,
scavenging in crevices for ammonites,
sliding in the sludge and the rain
and came back with nothing.

(Except a muddy dog.)

There was a half-buried Victorian dump
where your dog would help us to dig.
We collected dirty fragments of porcelain,
pieced together the Blue Willow.
You pretended to smoke from cracked clay pipes;
I drank air from broken bottles with glass marble stoppers.
We found a spoutless teapot,
took it home, filled it with dried flowers,
put it on a shelf.

But one day

You threw away the teapot
because it clashed with your Wedgewood.
The old bottles with their stoppers
were no good for your Moet and Chandon.
You gave up the clay pipes
for Montecristo cigars.

And what's the use in searching for fossils
when you find yourself amongst rich dinosaurs?

Now the past is overgrown
and our paths have grown apart.

You have grown far too tall
to notice that your new Berluti shoes
have trampled over broken old teapots

broken old us

and that part of you

that died with your dog.