Dog Is Your Co-Pilot

A dog can save your life a thousand ways—
dramatic rescues, then the subtler ones
when you think your life’s over, yet Dog stays.

Your dog stays, too, with her unflinching gaze.
Her eyes are like two gleaming, dense, brown suns.
A dog can save your life! A thousand ways

a day there might be rescue—when it plays
that game where you’re the one she hunts yet shuns;
when you think your life’s over, yet Dog stays.

It’s time to reassess. You’re in a haze
of grief? So stand and ponder, while Dog runs.
A dog can save your life a thousand ways:

If you make this your mantra, the old daze
of misery, spent contemplating guns
when you think your life’s over yet it stays,

will dissipate. You’ll give unending praise
to Dog, that staunch co-pilot nothing stuns.
A dog can save your life a thousand ways
when you think your life’s over, yet Dog stays.

Lynne Knight’s fourth collection, Again, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press. She has also published four chapbooks. Her awards include a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an NEA grant, and the 2009 Rattle Prize. She lives in Berkeley.