The Forty-Ninth Day

[busker]

The Forty-Ninth Day


we put the dog in the earth and we waited.   - a startling line that draws the reader in. Waiting for what? What got the dog? All interesting questions 

it rained for a week. the garden grew a puddle, then a pond. - I am already thinking of Noah here

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. —- so the dead gives new life. Amniotic mud is imaginative.

the tree unrolled on the forty-second evening, stood tall. a miracle.
    the neighbors watched from the fence.

the final night i didn’t sleep. my mouth ached – from wanting too much,
    my mother said.

my father and i sat at the window all morning.
my hands were shaking i was so nervous.

he came at three o’clock, puffed, throat pulsed. feathers split out
    of his body. he seemed to fill the whole porch.
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.
    my mother asked, what good does it do. ...... so I take it that the dog became a giant Turkey. It’s bizarre and enthralling. It could allude to Jesus resurrected, but not quite looking the same. Or a hundred other similar stories.

This is an enigmatic poem with a number of great lines. My only gripe would be that the significance of 49 days is not clear. I tried looking at. Biblical allusions, but the closest I got to it was the counting of the Omer, which is rather obscure to non Jews. I couldn’t find a Noah, Jesus, or Moses allusion. I couldn’t find a Classical Greek or Latin allusion. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but I’m not sure it’s meant to be that arcane.

Other than that, I loved it