By A.E. Stallings
You squeezed its leash in your fist,
It followed where you led:
Tick, tock, tick, tock,
Nodding its wooden head.
Wagging a tail on a spring,
Its wheels gearing lackety-clack,
Dogging your heels the length of the house,
Though you seldom glanced back.
It didn’t mind being dragged
When it toppled on its side
Scraping its coat of primary colors:
Love has no pride.
But now that you run and climb
And leap, it has no hope
Of keeping up, so it sits, hunched
At the end of its short rope
And dreams of a rummage sale
Where it’s snapped up for a song,
And of somebody—somebody just like you—
Stringing it along.
Poem copyright ©2012 by A. E. Stallings, whose most recent book of poems is Olives, Northwestern University Press, 2012. Poem reprinted from Five Points, Vol. 14, no. 3, by permission of A. E. Stallings and the publisher.
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