Four-legged loss
May 10, 2025
I work the dread so many times
that it’s a kind of sudoku in my head —
rehearsing death like an actor a play.
Hopefully one day she will just not get up,
lie too long in her habitual basket
and avoid that dreaded visit to the vet.
There, liquid death is delivered kindly,
but the syringe is always filled with guilt
alongside yellow pentobarbital.
How can a dog understand that love
might write a prescription for death?
She can’t. She licks my hand, trust
written in the ageing eyes, so cloudy.
Human minds flick through possibility,
feel the knot of loss before death.
But dogs just are. Until they’re not.
PS Cottier
This poem was published in last year’s Grieve anthology, a book made up of entries to a yearly competition organised by the Hunter Writers Centre. The dog who inspired the poem has just died, being put to sleep at home, so I thought I’d republish the poem here. Anyone who has a dog in their life dreads the moment that they die, and believes their dog to be the best in the world. Vale Mango, my much missed Staffie. Fifteen years, and not nearly enough.
Poem: Sand cycle
February 3, 2025
Sand cycle
The sand stretches,
flexes its muscles,
and I am stuck, Goya’s dog,
pulled down,
waking in a different world.
Another world of sand.
I shake and try to pull myself
to a firmer edge. There is no edge,
and I suffocate, and wake again,
stranded, lungs filling, sinking.
I am trapped in an hourglass,
never emptying, dry drowning,
reborn on repeat, reversed
Sisyphus on the beach,
with ten million tiny rocks
pushing into ears and mouth and nose —
feldspar and silica and an
endless choke of grinding quartz.
PS Cottier
Well that’s a miserable poem for my first on the blog for 2025! Many people have had nightmares about being trapped, or suffocating, and this poem attempts to capture that feeling of dread.
In more cheerful news, another review of The Thirty-one Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella co-written by NG Hartland and myself can be found here. The reviewer is Tim Jones.
(Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson)
Poem: Nyx and Neon
January 21, 2024
The darkness and its dreams
have been tossed out like bottle caps,
or plastic wrappers, illuminated
into nothingness. Old goddesses
swapped for this new electricity,
these garish sharp scars flashing.
Neon is the worst, an intoxicating
brightness. He was recently elevated
to a minor god. I curse his vulgar
yellow slaps upon the face
of the sleeping earth, his bold
assertion of light when all
should give themselves to rest.
Newness needs to be won,
rebirthed at dawn, not lost
in this glut of fluorescence,
snarling through the black.
But I am Nyx, and I know —
Neon can never reach
the human’s rest of death.
There nothing disturbs the mud,
except the damp, and the quiet,
thorough recycling of the worms,
palest pink yet avid.
PS Cottier
Nyx personifies night, and was the goddess of the night. Neon was discovered in 1898, and is a ‘noble gas’, although Nyx doesn’t see it that way in my poem.
Poem: The pool
January 16, 2014
The pool
Time is swimming in the same lane as me.
Lapping me, laughing at my leisurely, languorous crawl.
He churns up the water, rude rapid muscled butterfly.
He should move to the lane marked fast,
And get out of this one marked slow.
Now Time swims slower, I have him at my shoulder.
I am still crawling, lazily elegant,
But he has broken into breaststroke, cloying and contained,
And so we swim side by side, companionably.
I am suddenly breathless, but way out in front.
Time dog-paddles, inefficient, no kick at all.
I can’t help winning.
I’ll soon hit the wall.
I can’t tumble turn.
P.S. Cottier
As the temperature in Canberra was 40 degrees celsius yesterday, and feels about the same today, I felt that a poem about swimming was called for. Swimming and death!
I went swimming at the Australian Institute of Sport pool earlier this week, and was quite pleased that I managed to do a kilometre (20 laps) as I haven’t swam in a proper pool for a while. Most of my water immersion activity (ah, the beauty of unnecessarily complicated expressions!) is undertaken at the beach these days.
But in 40 degrees, the pool seems the place to be, and one risks serious sunburn swimming outside in this weather, if one is as slow a swimmer as I am. Hilariously, a tourist one filmed me at the AIS, where the Australian swim team trains. He must have thought I was a proper swimmer. Given that I really can’t tumble turn, or dive, he must have a very strange idea of Olympic swimming!
‘The pool’ was first published in the Hand Luggage Only anthology, (UK) 2008, edited Christopher Whitby.
About whales
September 6, 2011
Stranded
Huge rubber torpedoes loose themselves onto shore;
a giant’s speed-humps beached. Incomprehensible,
these commas in a language no-one knows to speak.
Like sheep they follow each other, but no canny dog
can turn them, head them back to deep supporting sea.
Victims of gravity, bulk weighs them down,
and spread of sand becomes a massy grave.
That short word why grows in watchers’ minds,
pressing like the bodies on that fatal beach.
No answer comes. We water them like giant bulbs,
and strain to plant them back in bed of ocean.
But sometimes there can be just too much coast.
Unseen sirens called them, and some turned back
to dire, heavy death. Lapped by waves,
gentle as a fading memory, what do whales see
in that final surge, before their spirits swim away?
P.S. Cottier
PS Cottier 