Boulder
The thing is, he doesn’t complain—
“Why are we following the same trail we took yesterday?”
(And, I might add, the day before that, too.)
Perhaps he doesn’t notice, but of course he does.
He just doesn’t care! Part pit bull, part sweetheart,
he plods along as if there is no déjà vu.
He still wants to smell the plants and pee
in the right places. It’s all as interesting
as it ever was. The path deserves its due.
I have to admire his performance:
a smell, a poke, a glance. Progress is slow.
The leash often limits what he wants to pursue.
But when we get back, I’ve been converted
by his shrugged-approach to life’s repetitions: make them new.
…
This poem first appeared in Calliope.
If you haven’t yet, make room in your heart: adopt a pet.
John Delaney retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for his last 15 years, curator of historic maps. He has written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific, First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps, and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions. He has written poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, he attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. No doubt, in subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. His poetic publications include Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, Galápagos (2023), a collaborative work of his son Andrew’s photographs and his poems, Nile (2024), poems and photographs about Egypt, and Filing Order: Sonnets (2025). He lives in Port Townsend, WA.
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