A Dog Watching a Squirrel, and: Accidental Delivery David Wagoner (bio) A Dog Watching a Squirrel She's been told No,meaning Forget about it! meaning Heel! Give up the whole idea of chasinga harmless fellow creature,meaning Stay right where you are, you, and think about something else,but her whole glittering brainbehind her glittering eyes and her whole galvanized body and every brindled hairis saying this cocked tailand all this uncanine chatter here on her home ground is in need of direct action,that although the principal partsof the origin of species may have left them briefly together in overlapping factions,rubbing both of them rawwith provocative, unleashed acts, their destinies belong above for a squirrel and downhere on earth for her,and all she asks from me is to be turned loose in order to bark up the right tree. [End Page 329] Accidental Delivery It was a military termonce used in official reportsfor the gunning or mortaring,shelling or general bombarding of one's own troops. These words seem now even more remote from the facts of lost lives than they must have been back then,but at least are less sinisterthan friendly fire. With the bestof intentions, warriorsof all stripes in the past and present have had their faults uncovered, have made mistakes, and confessed, sort of, on paper. All sides of collateral damageunder analysis seeminevitable to them, thereforeexcusable. How can theypossibly win a war without killing as many as the traffic will allow? And if that means some people have taken the wrong direction,turned right at the wrong timesand were left in the wrong places,it's a euphemistic matterdeserving a Requiescat in pace in memoriam ante bellum et post bellum ante mortem et post mortem, in perpetuum, in perpetuum. [End Page 330] David Wagoner David Wagoner has published eighteen books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and Copper Canyon will publish his nineteenth, After the Point of No Return, in 2012. He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets in 2011. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and twice for the National Book Award. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to its end in 2002. He teaches in the low-residency MFA Program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. Copyright © 2011 David Wagoner