or hurled like bags of sand from rented cars

have followed their noses to market towns

and bounced like balls into their owners’ arms.

I heard one story of a dog that swam

to the English coast from the Isle of Man,

and a dog that carried eggs and bacon

and a morning paper from the village

surfaced umpteen leagues and two years later,

bacon eaten but the eggs unbroken,

newsprint dry as tinder, to the letter.

A dog might wander the width of the map

to bury its head in its owner’s lap,

crawl the last mile to dab a bleeding paw

against its own front door. To die at home,

a dog might walk its four legs to the bone.

You can take off the tag and the collar

but a dog wears one coat and one colour.

A dog got rid of—that’s a dog for life.

No dog howls like a dog kicked out at night.

Try looking a dog like that in the eye.

GOALKEEPER WITH A CIGARETTE

That’s him in the green, green cotton jersey,

prince of the clean sheets—some upright insect

boxed between the sticks, the horizontal

and the pitch, stood with something up his sleeve,

armed with a pouch of tobacco and skins

to roll his own, or else a silver tin

containing eight or nine already rolled.

That’s him with one behind his ear, between

his lips, or one tucked out of sight and lit—

a stamen cupped in the bud of his fist.

That’s him sat down, not like those other clowns,

performing acrobatics on the bar, or press-ups

in the box, or running on the spot,

togged out in turtleneck pyjama-suits

with hands as stunted as a bunch of thumbs,

hands that are bandaged or swaddled with gloves,

laughable, frying-pan, sausage-man gloves.

Not my man, though, that’s not what my man does;

a man who stubs his reefers on the post

and kicks his heels in the stud-marks and butts,

lighting the next from the last, in one breath

making the save of the year with his legs,

taking back a deep drag on the goal-line

in the next; on the one hand throwing out

or snaffling the ball from a high corner,

flicking off loose ash with the other. Or

in the freezing cold with both teams snorting

like flogged horses, with captains and coaches

effing and jeffing at backs and forwards,

talking steam, screaming exhausting orders,

that’s not breath coming from my bloke, it’s smoke.

Not him either goading the terraces,

baring his arse to the visitors’ end

and dodging the sharpened ten-pence pieces,

playing up, picking a fight, but that’s him

cadging a light from the ambulance men,

loosing off smoke rings, zeros or halos

that drift off, passively, over the goals

into nobody’s face, up nobody’s nose.

He is what he is, does whatever suits him,

because he has no highfalutin song

to sing, no neat message for the nation

on the theme of genius or dedication;