In "Dialogue on Time", I look at Tassel's constant passtime of trying to dig up the pattern from the carpet. It takes a certain patience to keep at such a task day after day -- a patience which humans usually lack. Or maybe the poem is about time rather than dogs. I've always been fascinated with the strange contortions of the future perfect tense. Someone (I can't now remember who) argued that many people who said they wanted to write really meant they wanted to 'have written' -- in other words to have the accomplishment of writer behind them (another notch on the bow). So then what is this obsession with accomplishment after all? It is what makes us both superior and inferior to dogs.

		How shall we spend our time?
		Slumped on the marble hearth, Tassel ponders.
		Sleep, she thinks, is best.
		But is nineteen hours too much?

		Some might say so,
		Some might say it's obscene.
		Orphans and strays can't get that much.
		Does any dog have the right
		while others are deprived?

		Tassel yawns -
		it's not that she lacks charity
		but politics is hard thinking
		except for barking away the nextdoor cat,
		and sniffing at passing dogs.

		Well even forgetting the others,
		isn't nineteen hours a waste?
		She could learn French, how to play the piano,
		seaman's knots or chess.

		She thinks about this a minute:
		this is true,
		such things are not so hard,
		but what's their point after all?

		She'll have accomplished something, I offer.
		Oh my, bite a crunchbone, the future perfect -
		what tenses these humans!
		how strange to want something finished
		before it's even started!

		Well then curious. Isn't she curious? I ask.
		Am I? she wonders,
		intrigued.
		Perhaps we're on to something.

		For yes there be two curious things:
		why one can't dawdle on winter walks
		and why the carpet pattern won't dig up.
		Both should be checked daily for any hint of change.

		Research is pleasant work,
		the hours are short. Some patience
		is helpful and an unflustered mind
		for sleeping in between.