Poem Of The Week: Mercies By Don Paterson

Mercies

She might have had months left of her dog-years,
but to be who? She’d grown light as a nest
and spent the whole day under her long ears
listening to the bad radio in her breast.
On the steel bench, knowing what was taking shape
she tried and tried to stand, as if to sign
that she was still of use, and should escape
our selection. So I turned her face to mine,
and seeing only love there – which, for all
the wolf in her, she knew as well as we did –
she lay back down and let the needle enter.
And love was surely what her eyes conceded
as her stare grew hard, and one bright aerial
quit making its report back to the centre.

It must be difficult for the many of us who don’t own family pets to fully comprehend the significance of the loss of a dog. But Don Paterson’s beautiful poem somehow transcends the barrier of instinctive detachment to speak to all.

Finding, in his formal sonnet, the perfect vehicle for distilling a powerful elegy, Paterson is concise, investing words of extraneous reflection with the heartbreaking symptoms of physical decline, leading up to the pivotal moment of quietus, as an overdose of anaesthetic is expressed through a canula.

Answering the question of doubt that naturally inheres to animal euthanasia – has the decision been taken too early? – Paterson’s narrator addresses his dog’s quality of life from the perspective of age and decline. As ‘light as a nest’, listening all day to ‘the bad radio in her breast’, the dog’s simple raison d’etre is terminally undermined.

The cold steel of the bench is an oxymoron in a tableau of focused emotional engagement, where a love that is tendered is returned freely by the animal. The effort of will demanded of the dog to stand, in a final, half-hearted, imitative gesture of usefulness, is followed by her willingness to accept the needle’s delivery.

Our sense of species-difference, the part of us that is supposed to enable perspective in times of grief, is dissolved in an access of love that is fully reciprocated by the dog, and is as far removed from her lupine instinct as to render its presence meaningless in this moment. Paterson’s final lines are utterly compelling: sustaining an earlier metaphor for transmission, the narrator fixes the dog’s loving gaze, as it ‘concedes’, its eyes lose focus and turn into a vacant stare. The image, as life spins away like the last electronic pulse in the universe, is unbearably poignant.

‘Mercies’ is taken from Don Paterson: 40 Sonnets, published by Faber & Faber (2015)

im. Marlowe - March 2010 to 12th July, 2024.