As I was finalizing selections to include in my forthcoming collection “The Other Village,” my old friend and sometime collaborator, the wood engraver Greg Lago came to mind. He often has since his passing last year. We worked together with printer Jim Benvenuto on a broadside suite of illustrated poems, “On the River,” in the late 1980s. Greg’s Winged Bull Studio in Clayton was the venue for the first reading of my first full-length book, “A Drop of Ink,” which featured those illustrations and poems.
But they were not the only wood engravings by Greg that spoke to me. As the first Gulf War wound down, I wrote a poem to accompany his grim illustration “Officer’s Mess.” And I wrote another to accompany his engraving “The Club Island Boatman.”
Poems that are written about specific works of art are called ekphrastic poems. But Greg’s illustrations are so narrative in character that my poems are not about the piece itself, but tell the stories they evoke, with characters and dialogue absent from the work itself.
One of my favorites, and a good fit for “The Other Village,” follows. It was written when my daughter was in grade school and I was running press at SUNY Canton. It shares the title of the Greg Lago engraving.
Three-legged Dog, Two-lane Blacktop
Half-blind, half-deaf, gray-muzzled
and three-legged, the black lab’s
still game, a weathered monument
to canine kind, homely, sociable,
a match for the flannel-jacketed,
ball-capped coot, the rotted pick-up
and sway-backed farmhouse, as if
a call was sent out to Central Casting.
But they’re real folks, just neighbors,
good for gossip and a cup of Joe. The lab
delivers a slimy ball back to my daughter,
regular as a clock while we chat.
His amputated gait is amazing quick,
as if another leg would be surplus.
When he starts to tire, he makes
the girl chase. His sly smile slobbers.
The old man humors my know-it-all ways,
seeing how I used to be a college boy
before I was a dad. Besides, he’ll tell you
he’s had worse for neighbors, at length,
give chapter and verse, with scatological
refinements honed over seventy-seven years
of fine grudge-making–an oration splendid
in its way as the King James Bible.
But the dog has heard it all before. He has
his own bones to pick. He goes to the roadside,
tail at point. If God loves old dogs, he’ll bring
down another speeding out-of-state sedan.
