A NARROW VICTORY OVER COMMUNICATION

By Rodney Jones

Grady, my father's friend at work, told him when he took his dog Hyacinth to the vet for a rabies vaccination, the assistant said, "In a few minutes just pull your truck out back by the dock and pick her up." 

But there had been a tragic misunderstanding. Because Hyacinth was lame, one-eyed, gaptoothed, and balding around the snout, the man assumed Grady had brought her in to be put down. 

Here my father paused to contemplate what he was not saying, and didn't say it, and then, even though he was an ironic man, in order to make up for telling a funny story about a very sad thing to his son, added, "Grady was foolish about that dog." 

Kind, disciplined, a sophisticated reader, he might have said crazy, but the word he used was foolish. My father liked the world. When he bought his first two heifers, he named them Beauty and Spot, speaking to them softly as he pitched their daily alfalfa and rubbed them behind the ears, and much later in his early nineties, when his herd had multiplied to more than a hundred, he still named each cow for its outward appearance. 

I do not believe I willfully copped my desire to communicate with animals from my father. I prefer imagining that, like our pho-optic sneezing or fear of heights, it is lodged deep in our DNA. 

In particular, I have liked their eyes, their fur, which we do not have, and their mortal souls, which are wings made of dust. 

I have considered crocodiles that pull us apart underwater. I have asked livestock for forgiveness. I have meditated on the divine rights of the virus. But I have not named animals for their outward appearance. 

My fledgling crow was Parchesi. My sow piglet, Hominy. I did not name the opossum who stopped one night on its journey across the back fence and held eye contact with me for nearly a minute, though I could have named it anything--standing there so peaceably--I could have called it Mahatma. 

Stranger, who do you think I live for? Centipedes from Mars. 

In the moment and on instinct at Thanksgiving, we get down on all fours and make noises to one another, one family in the twenty-first century: a man, a woman, a brown cat, and a spotted dog. 

Kind, disciplined, and sophisticated reader, I know everything on earth is sick, flooded, broken or burning. I would like to bark at this heat. 

Once I was wild, and still I am my father's son, calling "Sook, Here, Come, Bossy, Lambrusco, John Henry. I know we are all delicious, but I will not eat you."

Rodney Jones's new book, THE BODY AND THE END OF TIME, POEMS SELECTED AND NEW, 1985-2025, is forthcoming in 2026 from Louisiana State University Press. He has won the National Book Critic Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts award, and his poems have been selected for ten editions of THE BEST AMERICAN POEMS.