The Lady and the Tramp

By Bruce Guernsey Bruce Guernsey

As my mother’s memory dims

she’s losing her sense of smell

and can’t remember the toast

blackening the kitchen with smoke

or sniff how nasty the breath of the dog

that follows her yet from room to room,

unable, himself, to hear his own bark.

It’s thus they get around,

the wheezing old hound stone deaf

baying like a smoke alarm

for his amnesiac mistress whose back

from petting him is bent forever

as they shuffle towards the flaming toaster

and split the cindered crisp that’s left.

Poem copyright © 2007 by Bruce Guernsey, whose newest book, New England Primer, was published by Cherry Grove Collections (WordTech Communications) in 2008. Poem reprinted from Spoon River Poetry Review, Vol. XXVI, no. 2, by permission of the author.

Biography

Poet, teacher, and editor, Bruce Guernsey graduated from Colgate University 1966. He later earned MAs from the University of Virginia and The John Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of New Hampshire.

Bruce Guernsey’s quiet, observant poems draw vividly upon the nature of his surroundings in the Northeast—and later Midwest—United States. In an interview with poet Diane Lockward, Guernsey notes how the move from . . .

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