Grief usually arrives in poems wrapped in big language. Here it arrives in the flat voice of someone reporting what happened to a small dog. Maizy, a terrier, has died, put to sleep at home while Rachel, the speaker's partner, holds her "as if she were an infant." The speaker is watching from far away, since "it was hard not to be there with them in London," and the sorrow reaches him through "Zoom" and through a walk in the woods with an older friend. The central idea comes out of that walk: death is the one certainty, and a dead end is not necessarily a bleak place to arrive.
The poem's imagery is built on circles. Maizy "had always traveled in circles — around the park, around the block, around the garden," and as dementia sets in her circles "tightened drastically" until they fit into "a corner of the kitchen." The detail is both ordinary and devastating, because a dog's habitual routes become a map of her shrinking mind. When the first haiku arrives, the circle comes back in another form: "a spiral of leaves lying down / at my feet." A spiral is a circle that is closing in, and "lying down" lets the motion end in rest. It echoes Rachel's report that she felt Maizy "relax all over." The speaker is on the wrong side of an ocean, yet the leaves come and settle at his feet like a message.
The form helps. The poem alternates blocks of plain prose with two short, unpunctuated verses, an arrangement that resembles haibun. The prose has no rhyme and no regular rhythm. Its long, factual sentences move like a case history ("Her fits become more frequent and prolonged, each time leaving her a bit more impaired"), and I suspect the slip into the present tense in "become" is the writer's memory refusing to stay in the past. The verses then switch to compression. Lowercase, with no full stops, they leave the line breaks to do the work. The pause after "curled" in the final verse makes you hold the word before the image around it appears.
The middle section turns on a small, wry piece of storytelling. L., aged seventy, offers the bluntest line in the poem: "Death is the only thing we know to be true." Nobody answers it. Instead the walkers reach a T-intersection with a sign pointing left to "Beach – 1 mile" and right to "Dead End – 1 mile." The choice is almost too neat as a symbol, which is probably why the poem treats it so lightly. "We turn right" is stated with no fuss, and a mile later they stand in "a large clearing filled with reindeer lichen." The dead end turns out to be an opening, and the closing sentence, "There are certainly worse places to end up," is a masterpiece of understatement. It consoles without claiming too much.
The last haiku gathers everything up. "Curled / in a maze of roots / another life" can be read several ways. It might be a sleeping animal, or something newly born, or the shape Maizy took in Rachel's arms, or simply the forest's ongoing life under the surface. The word "maze" also sits suspiciously close to "Maizy," and it picks up the circling motif. The dog who got lost in her own house is now echoed in a tangle of roots where a different life has made itself at home. Judging by the imagery, the poem does not promise an afterlife. It only notices that life continues in forms we did not choose, and that loss and continuation grow in the same ground.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It does not inflate a pet's death into something grander, and it does not shrink it either. Rachel's crying and the distance of the screen are given as plainly as the leaves and the lichen. The poem seems to know that comfort rarely comes from announcements about mortality. It comes from small things that are noticed: a hand on a fur coat, a turn onto the right-hand path, a clearing no one expected.