Traces of the Dogs

Dear Friends,

Even in the familiar, oft visited, and intimately known, surprises still greet us. This summer, along meandering paths made with no regard for human convenience, and instead out of reverence for presence and attention, it seems that W.S. Merwin’s beloved dogs are guiding us to new delights.

A few weeks ago, down below the house along a path we take daily, we found a small and mud-caked metal tag somehow sitting right on a trailside stone, engraved with a phone number and a name. Peah, the last of William and Paula’s beloved chows, had once worn it on her collar as she made her garden rounds. And last month, we noticed something under the house for the first time. Two names had been carved into wet cement in what appears to be 1979—Ali and Koa.

I had heard stories of William and Paula’s many chows—Peah, Lili, Maoli, Makana, and Muku—from their friends in recent years, and from William himself in the last months of his life. Ali and Koa, though, were the shepherd-collie mixes of a more remote past. As it happens, we learned their stories in yet another find—a typewritten essay titled “Dogs in My Life,” in which William writes of Koa and Ali and their early days together here in Peʻahi. Koa arrived first:

Everything about him was beautiful… Smart, and close to me from the beginning. A teacher to me, day by day, of what a relationship with a dog might be.

Koa was soon joined by his brother, who William rescued from an unfit owner, and “whose dark markings on his shoulder blades look like folded wings:”

I called him Ali, the Italian for wing, which is part of the poet Dante’s name, Alighieri, and was a recurring image in my own writing…A Franz Kafka of dogs, an old soul, deeply serious and responsible.

Both Ali and Koa were close companions to William as the house was built and the pilings went up under what would become the west lanai. The dogs’ names dried into the early story.  But Ali, it seems, died soon after:

I had brought both puppies over to the house, many days when I was working on building it. Ali had seen some of it going up, but had not been here long enough to live in it. I carried him through the unfinished house on a pillow, into every room, talking to him, and telling him that he would go on being there, and buried him, wrapped in a shirt of mine he had known, under a breadfruit tree, not far from the front door.

Much of the stuff of the dogs’ lives remains here. A blue ceramic water bowl still sits on the front lanai, a tiny chow figurine guards William’s desk, and relics of all kinds—collars, tufts of hair—cover an altar dedicated to remembering his companions. All of William and Paula’s dogs have gone on being here—in poems, on the altar, in photographs throughout the house, and on stones that bear each of their names to mark their resting places. And happily, even after our half decade of stewardship, traces of the dogs continue to reveal themselves.

With warm wishes,

Sonnet