You don’t know the dog show
has been staged for your benefit
and all these dogs represent
people you’ve forgotten to thank
for their contributions to your life.

You don’t see that the handlers
in their odd and dowdy suits
are the teachers who brought you
the lessons you needed to learn
and paraded them before you.

You don’t recognize that those shiny coats
and brushed out fur and white hard teeth
are signifiers of crucial junctures
when you worshipped style over substance
and feared the honest chomp of a deserved bite.

All you know is the vague preferences
that stir you. You like the Westie,
the Skye, the Bearded Collie;
you are indifferent to the Toys;
you feel love for the Scottish Deerhound,

and that Viszla reminds you of
moments you were just ahead of Death,
who coursed behind you snapping at your heels
and guiding you to this moment where you
are the dog show watcher. 

You are fur, and breath, and memory.
You are observing effort that you’d never make yourself.
You are badly dressed and amazed and squealing
over animals that seem perfect and at ease when they move.
You wish you’d done something like this with your life.

Forty years of careful use
of a razor down the drain:
one bad swipe took the tiny birthmark
off my jaw, flush with the skin.
It bled for hours, it hurt like hell,
but the worst was yet to come:

the scar that replaced it came back
white and angry and tall, like a whitehead
gone rogue, screaming to all:
“Unclean! Adolescent! This one
killed his birthright with a blade!
This one has no skill! Ask him
about it! Make him explain it!”

I’d grow my full beard back
and hide it in there
if I thought it would help, but
I know I’d just hear it calling out
that it had been silenced. I’d walk around
mumbling, “shut up! SHUT UP! It was
an accident!” and poking at it buried deep
in the beard. Besides —
the beard these days
would come in full gray
and likely screaming about its own issues,
and one problem like that is quite enough.

So I let the scar stand out there on my jaw
for all to see. I have no idea what others think
it is. To me, it’s a badge, or a dodge
to convince myself I’m not so vain
as to care what others think. But I do.
Oh, I do. And I hate that in me,
how afraid I am of the voice in my jaw
that tells the world I screwed up. It was just a birthmark
but when I think about how that slip
has changed the way I see myself in the mirror,

it might as well have been an eye.