There is so little time to love

Spartacus was a great dog

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

There’s this website that posts poems by different writers. One of those poems was by Raymond Carver, a self-aware/self-loathing bit about writing a poem about his daughter’s dog’s death. There are a lot of reasons I found that poem today, but I can’t quite write about those reasons yet. Maybe I can by the end of the post.

Instead, I want to focus on what I saw on the comments.

For background, Raymond Carver died in 1988. The website even says this.

The poem, of course, hurts my heart in a multitude of way, but what caught me is this comment:

And then these comments.

There were people who complained that Carver’s writing style was too choppy for a poem. There were people who loved it. And then, of course, there were people that didn’t get that he, himself, was dead and that this was a website that just posted other people’s poems, not the poet posting their own.

Sometimes, I think, humans are so hard to understand.

And dogs?

Dogs are a lot easier. Dogs are beautiful and far too good for us.

Sparty was one of those too-good-for-us dogs. Bumblebees and wasps would hitch rides on his back and head when we hiked or just walked in the woods. Cats would claim him as their own. He never met a dog or person, cat or bumblebee, UPS driver, Fed Ex driver or random squirrel that he wasn’t an instant fan of.

Hair dryers and x-ray tables at vets? Totally different story.

One of the hardest things in life isn’t realizing that people really lack attention to detail or that they like to make proclamations about a poet’s or another person’s worth (or lack of it), but that we have so little time to love, to get over ourselves, and just love.

I haven’t posted about Sparty on social media yet. But this is him, here, looking goofy and adorable and like a dog that doesn’t read the comments.

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