Stephen Kuusisto

ODE TO A DOG'S NOSE*

A dog's nose takes in the world like a child seeing a Cresh—animals, people, hay, friends, strangers, gifts, food, astonishment. Any dog's nose finds semantics in the fragrant spaces before it. Up hill and down we go, the blind guy and Labrador. The man hears a radio in a passing car. The dog smells the driver's fear stinks. The dog smells onions a block away. It goes without saying, the dog is more alive on the smelly planet than the man.

In Graz, Austria, I opened a window in our hotel and Vidal poked his head out and scented blackbirds. He was like an old man savoring perfume with his eyes closed. Vidal's smell-joy was palpable.

I wrote in my notebook: Spend all day with a dog's nose and try to imagine what's going on in there .

Up hill and down we went, Vidal and I. Austrian Dachshunds and their portly owners in the park.
A woman on roller skates with her Alsatian. Dogs happy with their owners. And Vidal scented everything—uncommonly—working his snout as he'd never worked it before. His was the nose supreme. He smelled the European Turtle Doves—I'm certain he said, "We ain't got this in New York." —smelled the Common Cuckoo, a yellow smell, what else would it be? And the Hoopoe and Green woodpecker—they probably smelled like pepper. And Nightingales; European Robins…

I wrote in my notebook: New doors in a dog's psyche? Or have they always known these smells—know them from the canine genome?

We went inside a mountain and navigated tunnels dug by the Nazis. I wondered if Vidal smelled the patina-smoke of misery still clinging to the damp stones. I wondered if there's a half life to the odor of fear.

Odors of vulnerability; of losses; of luck… And dogs prancing through them…

Would a dog know losses? Surely he'd smell them. One thinks of Hemingway's description of a dry fountain giving off the odor of death. Dogs smell everything as optimism. This is one of their secrets. One remembers Helen Keller who said:

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit."

Dog noses open new doorways.

*Previously published in Stephen Kuusisto's blog Planet of the Blind.

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind and Eavesdropping and a volume of poems, Only Bread, Only Light. He has recently completed a new collection of poems, Letters to Borges which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. He teaches at Syracuse University.