Dave Bonta's "Boneyard Dogs" is about a dog that never appears. We meet its ghost, its stone likenesses and the trees it can no longer water, but never the animal itself. The poem is built entirely from absence, and the closing lines suggest that writing is one way of dealing with it.
The opening question sounds practical, almost like a line from a manual: "How does one lay out a dog for burial?" The answer is superstition: "Do it wrong and its ghost will circle / endlessly, unable to lie down." The detail is well chosen. Dogs circle before they settle, so the ghost is condemned to a habit it can never finish. A single image makes the haunting both eerie and tender, since the dead animal is still acting like itself.
From there the poem moves by quick, loosely linked jumps, like a notebook. Live dogs are banned from the cemetery, so "we look for their stone snouts among the angels." The line is gently funny, since the snouts sit among the angels like unexpected guests, but it also shows people hunting for what the place has excluded. Then comes the boldest turn: "Has anyone considered that dogs may not want us / with them in heaven?" The usual consoling picture of a pet waiting for its owner is flipped. We become the intruders, the ones who "would frighten the wolves." The phrase reminds us that wildness still lies under the domestic animal, and that our love for dogs may be more one-sided than we like to think.
The tone then shifts to deadpan comedy. "A cemetery is the last refuge of invisible friends" could mean ghosts, or the imaginary companions we outgrow, or simply the dead who still seem to keep us company. It is followed at once by a tourist "with a map to celebrity gravesites," which punctures any solemnity. The poem sets real feeling beside the ordinary business of sightseeing and lets neither cancel the other out.
The fifth stanza names Highgate, a London cemetery, and gives the poem its best joke and its strangest line. The trees "need not fear the lifted hind leg," so they "go wild, permitted / every extravagance except death." The enjambment helps here: "permitted" hangs at the end of its line, and the list of allowed excesses spills into the next. The final phrase is open to more than one reading. The trees may be exempt from the dead's sorrow, or death may be the one thing a cemetery reserves for its human tenants. Either way, the living things here grow lavishly on top of the dead.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its stanzas run three, two, two, two, three and four lines. The rhythm is that of speech, with questions and short statements and a dry, almost conversational voice. That plainness suits the subject, because a more ornate style might tip the poem into sentimentality about pets and death.
The final stanza changes the poem's direction. For the first time there is an "I," writing "six weeks later / in a silence greater than any in all London." Silence is the right word for a poem full of missing barks. The speaker sits "in the darkness, / trusting my faithful pen to find the way." "Faithful" is a word we usually save for dogs, and a pen that leads through the dark recalls a guide animal. The poem suggests that writing has taken the dog's place as companion, at least for now. The ghost circles because it can't lie down, and the notes circle their subject without settling on a single meaning, so the poem may be doing something similar.
That is what makes "Boneyard Dogs" worth reading. It never says "I miss the dog," and it doesn't need to. By approaching loss through folklore, jokes, stone animals and unruly trees, it shows a mind working around a feeling too large to face directly, and the indirectness makes the feeling more convincing.