It’s not often that we get to hear what our dog is thinking. Even more rare is to overhear a dog waxing philosophical as he contemplates his own mortality relative to his master’s. “We’re buying a heartache,” my father warned before he finally gave in to my entreaties to have a dog. The dog in the poem only wishes that his owner shares that awareness. Not much to ask, especially, as we already know, the dog is likely to go first through the final door.
A Dog on His Master
As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.
Billy Collins is a former two-term U.S. Poet Laureate (2002–03) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “A Dog on His Master” originally appeared in Aimless Love (Random House, 2013). Collins’s most recent book is Musical Tables (Penguin Random House, 2022).