Declarations of War
Poetry by Jim Smith
Photography by Jeff Gynane
(for Bess, a mutt, hit by a car on the Don Valley Parkway the same moment I sat down to write)
I’m sorry I never told my old black dog much of anything.
We walked for literal years, both on what we knew was the sharp end of the leash, while I chanted “arnie this, and arnie that” and real gems like “arnie and jim, jim and arnie.”
I never told him why I stopped writing, or why I went to law school, or how I stopped drinking, or how I stopped smoking, or how I stopped breathing.
Never took him to Nicaragua, or back to my childhood, or up in my spaceship.
He was naked for sixteen years, then he died.
My favourite memory of Jo-Anne’s memories of me is when she told me she’d seen me at 2 a.m. in the icy backyard picking him up and walking around, on legs that never worked again.
He kept whispering to me “jim and arnie, arnie and jim.”
We bought him for thirty-seven dollars, which works out to just over two bucks a year, which is quite a bargain in the end.
