Billy Collins: Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog

 She's painfully slow,

so I often have to stop and wait 

while she examines some roadside weeds

as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.

And she's not a pretty sight anymore,

dragging one of her hind legs,

her coat too matted to brush or comb,

and a snout white as a marshmallow.

We usually walk down a disused road

that runs along the edge of a lake,

whose surface trembles in a high wind

and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.

We don't walk very far before

she sits down on her worn haunches

and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.

Then it's time to carry her back to the car.

Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,

I realize I should tell you

she's not really seventy-five. She's fourteen.

I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense

of the bizarre, the curiosities of the siedshow.

I mean who really cares about another person's dog?

Everything else I've said is true,

except the part about her being fourteen.

I mean she's old, but not that old,

and it's not polite to divulge the true age of a lady.