Blue
/Doug Van Hooser
The neighbor’s dog, Blue, keeps barking
so I decide to keep trying.
Be relentless as the dog’s loneliness.
To try again like the fungus
that each year reappears on the oak stump.
It finds reason in dead wood.
The ceaseless despair of the dog
shuts off like a faucet
and becomes an unbridled torrent
of leaping, wagging joy
at the sound of a mumbling muffler
tied under a faded blue Toyota
dinged with dozens of small wounds.
I would like to be so pleased.
Be greeted by my ambition.
Consummate my desire.
Eliminate the whine of repeated attempts
and shake the hand of success,
even if it looks beyond me
and continues down the line
of all its guests.
Author’s Note: One of our neighbors last summer decided to open the slider of an upstairs room to a small balcony during the day. The dog found it and from the minute the owner left in the morning until the minute the dog heard the mumbling muffler of the owner's car in the afternoon, the dog howled and barked his loneliness for multiple days in a row. One of the beauties of writing is connecting one's (here, the dog's) emotional response to a situation to another person's unrelated response that has a mutual characteristic. In this case, the dog's relentless lonely barking and his over the top joy both connected with me.
Doug Van Hooser's poetry has appeared in Chariton Review, Split Rock Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, After Hours and Poetry Quarterly among other publications. His fiction can be found in Red Earth Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Bending Genres Journal. Doug’s plays have received readings at Chicago Dramatist Theatre and Three Cat Productions. More at dougvanhooser.com
