Old

This starts from a personal experience, when I was a vet assistant. He was the first dog I had to hold for euthanization. This also talks about my dad who is certainly still alive.

I walked a boxer named Marlow to his grave,

Held him down while he looked at me with

Tired eyes buried in wrinkles like my father.

Daddy played football in high school, took a nasty fall

To his back which he believes is the cause of his struggle.

Daddy what’s wrong I ask him when he groans, leans against the table.

I done got old too soon he says to me

My favorite line from Cajun Night Before Christmas

Though we are by no means Cajuns.

 

Christmas time and like kids all three of us are piled on the couch

Hot chocolate in our hands, warm winter teasing us with 50 degree weather.

We curl up together and listen close though the youngest of us

Is sixteen and stupid. I lean against my father’s creaking shoulder.

Breathing in, he is wood and coffee and marijuana.

Breathing in, Marlow is taking last beautiful gulps of air.

His legs don’t work but he’s only four.

Marlow you done got old too soon I tell him before the doctor

Tries to find the vein and prick him with liquid death.

Marlow looks at me the whole time he is dying like he

Knew me before I brought him from his kennel.

His last breath already blew, I lift his sixty pounds of now dead

Weight into his casket of an empty extra large Science Diet dog food bag.

I slip off his leather collar before we close his body up.

I breathe in the leather and dirt.

 

My father breathes in leather and dirt, tending his garden in the backyard,

His knees rebuilt and groaning as he stands. Twenty years more, he falls hard

On his back, broken ankle, spilled begonias, shattered clay pots.

Daddy you done got old too soon I tell him.

We lift his body of two hundred pounds and dump him in his casket of pine,

Us kids gathered around and reading the Cajun Night Before Christmas like we were all five.

You done got old too soon.

Author's Note

I'm looking specifically for advice on the structure. I'm playing with form here, and definitely sentence structure. I'll take all suggestions, except for those about grammar. I am intending this to sound as though the speakers have brief educational history.

Reviews

[Emma Keynes]

I really like how the two stories are interwoven. It really makes it more understandable to readers. I also liked the imagery a lot as well. Really nice poem. :)