A man walks out at midday, spots a stray, and by the end of the street has met himself. That is the quiet trick of "At the Crossroads," dated Trivandrum, 19 April 2012. On the surface it is a small street scene. The speaker recognises an old female dog near his house, the "clandestine lover" of his own Tommy, evidently a dog, who has been gone two years. Underneath, the poem is about ageing, loneliness, and the question of who will notice when a life ends.
The opening is deliberately unkind. "Bitch" and "mutt" are blunt, almost contemptuous words, and the second stanza keeps adding to the list: "black and mangy," teats "sweeping the street," a "rough coat coated with dirt." The clotted repetition of "coat" and "coated" makes the line itself feel grimy, and the hissing s-sounds of "swollen teats sweeping the street" seem to drag her body along the ground. Judging by that image, hers has been a life of repeated litters and hard survival. Then comes the hinge: "Yet – she was my Tommy's lover." The dash and the "Yet" are a small act of loyalty. Having run her down, the speaker will not let her be only that. The word "lover" returns from the first stanza, and she matters because of what she once was to someone he cared for.
Verbs carry the poem's sense of time. Tommy belongs to the past tense ("used to be," "was"), while the present is where decay happens. The dog "has turned quite old," her face "has turned grey," and the verb comes back in the last lines in a new sense: "turns right; / I turn left." Ageing and direction share one word, as though growing old were just another fork in the road.
The two-line fourth stanza is the poem's coldest moment. "I wonder if anybody would miss her / When she dies, sick, starved or a roadkill." The list of deaths is flat and offhand, and "a roadkill" reduces her to an object. The question is never answered. The poem turns it around instead.
The fifth stanza shifts to the speaker's own body, and the echoes are exact. She limps; "I limp." Her fur has fallen off "in patches"; he wipes his "bald head." The short clipped clauses of "I sweat, I palpitate" make the rhythm breathless, so we hear the effort as well as read it. Then he catches sight of himself in a shop window, and the pronoun changes: "An old man, dragging his feet." He does not say "I." Either he fails to recognise his reflection or he cannot bear to claim it, and this distance is the most painful moment in the poem. Coming straight after the wondering about who would miss the dog, it suggests, as an inference, that he has just asked the question of himself. The midday setting helps. In full noon light there are no shadows to hide in.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. Line lengths vary, and the stanzas shrink and swell (four, four, four, two, five, two). The language is plain and conversational, closer to a man muttering to himself than to a performance, and that restraint stops the subject from tipping into sentimentality. The one flourish is "espy," a slightly bookish word that sits oddly beside "mutt," as if he first sees her from a polite distance before the closeness shows.
The ending is perfectly balanced. Dog and man pass each other, one goes right, the other left, and neither acknowledges the other. The title's crossroads is a real junction, but it is also the point where two similar fates part company. The final words, "head home," carry a faint chill. Since Tommy is gone, the poem leaves us to wonder who, if anyone, is waiting there.
The poem is worth reading for what it refuses to do. It does not announce that the speaker is lonely, and it does not tell us he will grieve for the dog. It lets a mangy stray, the last living trace of his pet, work as a mirror, and it leaves the reader with the unanswered question about being missed.