For all of us who have "good, good friends"
Maryanne
Cairo
Poem: "Other Nations" by Kate Barnes from Kneeling Orion. © David R. Godine. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)Other Nations For Maxine Kumin I used to think women who talked baby talk to their animals were the rock bottom. Now I'm not so sure. Now I open my moth and hear, coming out of it, :Is you a good, good dog?" words that are falling in their light, descending order to two pricked ears, a hairy face, a glowing eye, an unbroken concentration on the excellent, bone-shaped dog biscuit I'm holding up, increasing our pleasure with some slight, prolonging chitchat. My neighbor Zoë, at twelve, cries to her cat, "Oh, dearest, darlingest Wooshiekins!" as she presses extravagant kisses on the round head of a pale, torpid marmalade who doesn't seem to mind (but her silent father gets up and leaves the room). "They are other nations," my own father wrote, "caught with ourselves in the net of life and time." Of course, he meant the wild ones, but our household allies, too, link us to a greater world. We wish we could speak their languages; and, meanwhile, they learn ours. When the rein snaps while I'm driving home in the buggy, with Blackberry trotting hard, grabbing the bit, through the rush of a blustery March day, I don't start hauling on the other rein and risk tipping us over or starting a runaway; I call to him loudly, "wa-alkwa-alk" and after he does that he hears me say, "Whoa!" and he does that. So how can I ever praise that huge person enough, those twelve hundred pounds of best behavior who may just have saved my life? I get out and tie the ends of the parted rein as he rolls his questioning eye, and I pat his strong, damp neck, repeating, over and over, without thought, a mantra of gratitude to gods and animals. "Thank you," I say, "thank you, thank you, kind fate, thank you, my good, good friend!"
