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Widow and Dog Maxine Kumin In this last poem, a woman who is not widowed imagines what it might be like to live alone and to attain a kind of serenity after the death of a husband of many years. —Eds. After he died she started letting the dog sleep on his side of the bed they had shared for fifty-one years. A large discreet dog, he stayed on his side but the tags on his collar jingled as he sighed and especially when he scratched so she took his collar off and then his smooth tawny bulk close to her but not touching eased her through the next night and the next. One morning, a chipmunk and his wife somehow slipped in through the screen door when neither of them was looking. She got up screaming from her coffee and whacked at them with a broom. Dog pounced and pounced but they were faster than he was and dove under the refrigerator. After a while he stopped crashing into chairs and skidding around corners in fruitless pursuit and then they came and went untroubled even drinking out of his water dish, their tails at right angles. That summer it just seemed simpler to leave the window by the bird feeder open for ease of refilling. Some creatures slipped casually out and in. The titmice were especially graceful. She loved to watch them elevate and retract their crests whenever they perched on the lips of the kitchen counter. The goldfinches chittered and sang like drunken canaries and once in a thunderstorm a barred owl blundered into the fake crystal chandelier she had always detested. 317 318 the widows’ handbook Autumn fell on them in a joyous rush. The first needles of hard frost, the newly sharp wind, the final sweep and swirl of leaves, a swash of all-day rain were not unwelcome. Hickory nuts ricocheted off the barn’s metal roof like a rain of BB gun pellets. They both took afternoon naps. They both grew portly. While Dog in his dumb allegiance dozed on the hearth, sometimes he ran so fiercely in his dreams that he bared his teeth. Reclusive comfortable Widow scribbled in her journal. It did not matter how much she woolgathered, how late into the night she read, it did not matter if she completed this poem, or another. ...

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