Dogs: Purest Poetry

I've been laid up or laid low (whichever best explains an instructive silence) with a bad case of the dogless blahs.

But with National Poetry Month in its final hours, I think it's time for me to go from bed to verse and confide that in April I added to my daily two- to three-mile walks a more exhausting workout: imagine iambic pentameter and all its mates as a barbelled treadmill and the ever-expanding universe of rhyme schemes as Wall Street's weightiest derivatives. I'm still breathing, but otherwise unmoved.

Every morning I would read a poem about dogs. And then I would go for my walk and watch dogs walking, not with me, because they were not my dogs, but with me just because we were all in motion. Those walks scanned better than anything I came upon on paper.

Perhaps I expect too much of poetry, or simply can't benefit from what I am willing, if too breathless, to appreciate.

It's time for an afternoon walk. It's perfect dog-walking weather, and there will be dogs, or as the wordbound might express it, purest poetry.