The Forty-Ninth Day

[dukealien]

The Forty-Ninth Day


we put the dog in the earth and we waited.

it rained for a week. the garden grew a puddle, then a pond.

a tree stooped to the yard on the seventeenth day. it stretched limbs,
    tucked head to ground.

the surface of the pond became knitted with worms. warm bodies,
    engorged with amniotic mud.

the tree unrolled on the forty-second evening, stood tall. a miracle.  "unrolled" doesn't fit the image of head-bowed tree
    the neighbors watched from the fence.   consider removing the initial "the"

the final night i didn’t sleep. my mouth ached – from wanting too much,  excellent dual-meaning phrase, "from wanting too much"
    my mother said.

my father and i sat at the window all morning.  "sat at" is infelicitous - "watched by" or "watched at" could work
my hands were shaking i was so nervous.

he came at three o’clock, puffed, throat pulsed. feathers split out maybe "pulsing" instead of "pulsed," maybe a better word than "split"
    of his body. he seemed to fill the whole porch.  is "whole" necessary?
my father was quiet. he has the same eyes, i said, the feathers are sort of
    the same brown.

in the end we didn’t open the door. the turkey left in the evening.  could use semicolon instead of period after "door"
    my mother asked, what good does it do. could use question mark instead of period

Very mysterious, primitive, and ambiguous.  In tone, maybe even in substance, a little, it reminds me of some of Cormac McCarthy's early work (Child of God, The Orchard Keeper) with atavistic but successful - or at least effective - ceremonies.

Your most ambiguous line is the last:  Mom is a believer, but what does she mean?  That we got a turkey back in place of a good dog, or if we're going to perform the rite and wait until the seventh day of the seventh week we should at least eat the turkey?  Or let the resurrected in?

McCarthy's characters are said to perform "rituals as old as time" and this has the same vibe.  I liked your poem with its two twists (what animal, the dissenting mom).  The above are mostly suggestions rather than hard recommendations.  Other arcane/pre-pagan country (Appalachian?) tales could follow.