"Tony Abbott's The Man Who is a shape-shifter of a book, leading us subtly, often slyly, to the edge of sight and then saying, "Look!" When poetry has enabled us to see our own breath, it has fulfilled its promise. It has helped us walk back into our lives."
-Kathryn Stripling Byer
North Carolina Poet Laureate 2005-2009
The Man Who Loved Animals
July Fourth, early evening, family
and friends gathered, sun setting, fireworks
an hour away, the dog not in his
accustomed place beneath their feet. They find
him in the woods, half buried, surely gone
to die.
Surprisingly the doctor's office answers.
A young vet sewing up a cat says, Bring
him in, and all of them carry the dying
dog to the waiting van. The doctor
operates at once, and the dog lives
for five more years.
Now, another July morning, Southern sky
hazy blue, the doctor drives to work, son
and heir in his infant chair, facing backwards
as the law prescribes. In his mind he drops
the baby at the sitter, then drives to work,
his brain churning with the day's events:
surgery on an old dog's eye, an evening
meeting at the Y.
The car bakes all day in the summer sun.
At five he leaves to retrieve his son.
The boy, he's sure, has played all day,
napped and sucked the bottle willingly
from the woman's careful hands. He finds
the child silent as a doll.
Over and over his broken heart replays
the morning's ride. He knows he dropped
the baby off.
So what can we say
Of this man who loves the red ears of foxes,
the padded paws of long-legged dogs,
and the soft fingers of his infant son?
That God loved him, loves him still, even after
he has lost all hope of love that light creeps in
after darkness even when we think
it never can. I know nothing about walking
into light, not even how to take the first step.
But the god who numbers the small bones
in the sparrow's wing can take the fingers
and the light and shape them into something
new.
This I know and he, I think, knows too.
