Get Lost (“Portrait of a Lady holding her pet King Charles Spaniel”)
In a gallery in Edinburgh
You can see too many pictures
Of people holding dogs
Of a very specific breed.
Of course, I wouldn’t notice that
(I prefer Cats, you know)
If your Charlie wasn’t small enough
To fit in my heart,
If you hadn’t painted Charlie
At the back of my eyelids.
We spent hours roaming the gallery,
Exploring the city,
Getting lost.
And we almost forgot
That time slips,
Time gets spilled,
Hearts grow bigger
And things fall out of them.
***
So, hold on to your dogs
Or get lost!
Great opening stanza – absolutely spot-on tone for this kind of wry observation – and the rather arch line ‘I prefer Cats, you know’ works well too. I’m not quite so sure about the lines referring to ‘Charlie’ – obviously you don’t have to identify everything/everyone in a poem, but it just threw me a bit while reading (i..e. ‘who is Charlie? dog? Human?’). Really nice towards the end too – ‘Hearts grow bigger/And things fall out of them’ – and the final ‘get lost’ (with its double meaning).
thank you :) Charlie is my friend's dog (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel) :D