Poem
Jo Shapcott
UNCERTAINTY IS NOT A GOOD DOG
UNCERTAINTY IS NOT A GOOD DOG
UNCERTAINTY IS NOT A GOOD DOG
Uncertainty is not a good dog.She eats bracken and sheep shit,
drops her litters in foxholes
and rolls in all the variables,
wriggling on her back, until
she reeks of them,
until their scents are her scents.
She takes sudden, windy routes
through hummocks, cairns and ditches
so you can\'t spot where she is
and acknowledge her velocity
at the same time. She’s fidgety,
but still careful to snuffle
through all the mud on the trail.
She can\'t see in the dark
but bumps her snout
on the overhang lapping
the path. Daylight’s no better:
she has to screw her eyes
tight against the glare
and, panting, just risk it, following
her nose across the landscape
her tongue brighter than probability,
brighter than heather, winberry and scree.
© 2009, Jo Shapcott
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Jo Shapcott
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1953)
Jo Shapcott was born in 1953 in London and educated in Dublin and Oxford and at Harvard. She has worked extensively in universities and in arts education, including at the Arts Council and the Southbank Centre. In 1985 she won first prize in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition with ‘The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City’, which was later included in her first collecti...
Poems
Poems of Jo Shapcott
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UNCERTAINTY IS NOT A GOOD DOG
Uncertainty is not a good dog.She eats bracken and sheep shit,
drops her litters in foxholes
and rolls in all the variables,
wriggling on her back, until
she reeks of them,
until their scents are her scents.
She takes sudden, windy routes
through hummocks, cairns and ditches
so you can\'t spot where she is
and acknowledge her velocity
at the same time. She’s fidgety,
but still careful to snuffle
through all the mud on the trail.
She can\'t see in the dark
but bumps her snout
on the overhang lapping
the path. Daylight’s no better:
she has to screw her eyes
tight against the glare
and, panting, just risk it, following
her nose across the landscape
her tongue brighter than probability,
brighter than heather, winberry and scree.
UNCERTAINTY IS NOT A GOOD DOG
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