Henry
Twenty-two
years dead, my doing,
I
being the one who led him
to
the car, his joy, tail wagging
as
I drove him to the vet.
One
night, though, still young
and
alert, he saved us all—me,
my
wife, our two kids—
when
the motor in the oil furnace froze,
poisoning
the house with smoke
like
metal shavings filling our lungs.
It
was Henry’s whining and barking
that
got us up and out of the house.
The
firemen did the rest as we
huddled
in our car till the noxious
fumes
had cleared, Henry jammed in
between
us, unbearably happy,
expecting
a drive into town
or
maybe the countryside.
Roger
Pfingston has poems in recent issues of I-70
Review, Naugatuck River Review, RHINO, and Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. His chapbook, A Day Marked for Telling, is available
from Finishing Line Press.
