Carolyn Tipton: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Carolyn Tipton

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Carolyn Tipton

Three Poems

A Letter I Wish My Dog Would Write Me

Dear Carolyn,

                        I forgive you for taking

my life, while I could still sniff and see.

I forgive you for not taking my life

when I could no longer move with any ease.

I forgive you for exchanging harsh words with

my other master, for I loved you both.

I am at an interim place; I don’t know where.

There is no pain, but there is also

no light.  But there is a door ahead.

Right now, I can no longer smell the sea.

But I remember Limantour, on each of my birthdays:

the shining sparkles on waves that broke

into lacy skirts like yours; the silly sandpipers

I loved to chase while my blue sand shadow raced

beside me; the salt and seaweed fish-breeze that made

my tail wag the very moment we reached the beach.  Thank you.

And thank you for taking me in the boat across

the mountain lake (I couldn’t help diving in

even before we touched the shore!). Thank you

for including me at every picnic.  Thank you,

near the end, when you kept moving my bed

so it’d be always in full sun.

I know you loved me, even when

you were impatient that I struggled

to move on my last days.  I know you were sad when

after racing ahead of you, then trotting beside you,

I began to walk behind you, and even to halt.

Our lives are even briefer than your own,

but you bear on yours my imprint, as I bear yours

on mine.  I’m getting ready to go through the door.

I know we wish for me green fields, and days

of summer light.  But I wish, too, for a fragrant breeze

that brings your scent to me.  I’ll always love you.

                                                                          ~Your Olé

Dementia

In the videos the Health Plan sends

someone’s hand lies atop another’s.

It’s all in soft focus.

Where is the anger? the hurt?

No one is yelling.  No one

is saying, “Where did you put it?”

No one is thinking, “I see him,

but he’s not here.  Where did he go?”

He left in such small increments that

I’ve only lately realized he’s gone.

How do you have a memorial

for someone still alive?

And I myself wouldn’t mind

some flowers and expressions of sympathy.

People disapprove of my lack

of compassion, that I’m always

annoyed.  I would tell him about it,

except he’s not really there.

I think to say to him—and then realize

I can’t—maybe my anger is holding at bay

a flood of sorrow, a wave that would drown

my small world, and my heart has responded

in the only way it knows how

to keep my head above the water.

It takes a while each morning

to reweave the tapestry, find again

my pattern in the cloth.  Dream’s

fingerprints only slowly disappear

from the new day. 

                           But even then,

my own myth takes time to reassemble,

though somehow it’s the outer world

that puts it back together: the opening

rose lifts me if I let it.

How we find ourselves each morning

is a secret, how the heaviness

sinks away, sorrow’s grip is loosed, 

and the spirit can once again imagine itself

a swooping swallow, and remember

the sweetness of the evening light.

At the Periodontist’s

I always ask whoever works on me

to tell a story from her life.  Does she

have a dog?  Has she just been on a trip?

This hygienist says No.  But then I see her tag—

an unusual name—and ask its origin.  Afghan,

she says; it means “soul” in her native tongue.

Self-involved, thinking only that I need distraction,

I ask how she feels about events there now.

Out pours a story of danger, sorrow, escape.

She is giving me five consecutive shots in my mouth,

she is saying she was smuggled out and had to climb

the mountains as a child.  She is using noisy tools

against my teeth, planing their roots, and saying she lay

face down in the dirt at any approaching sound, prodded

by a gun to the back of her head; no time

to stop and rest, nothing to eat. My ears ring, and

my mouth is full of blood; she soaks it up with cotton, says

Once, seven of us had to share an apple.

And then she says her father’s mind’s been weakened by the exile.

She starts to cry.  I have three instruments and gauze pads

in my mouth; I can’t speak, but I rise to touch her arm.

No one knows what immigrants go through, she says,

then afterwards, their pain is all inside.

I’m visibly swollen when she’s through with me.  She warns,

You’ll need Motrin tonight to make it all hurt less.

I have your story too, I say.

Author Bio:

Carolyn L. Tipton, born and raised in Berkeley, California, is a poet, translator, and teacher. She has a Master’s Degree in English/Creative Writing from Stanford University and a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for some years in the Fall Program for Freshmen. She has published many poems and translations both in various journals, including Partisan Review and Two Lines, and in anthologies, including Norton’s World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, and Robert Hass’ Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns, 1997-2000. She has been the recipient of various grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also been awarded writing residencies at The Banff Centre and the Vermont Studio Center.  She has given readings of her poems and translations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Spain, and Ireland.  Her first book of translations of the poetry of Alberti, To Painting: Poems by Rafael Alberti (Northwestern University Press), won the National Translation Award.  Her second, Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance (White Pine Press) won the Cliff Becker Translation Prize. Her third book, The Poet of Poet Laval, a collection of original poetry, has been recently published by Salmon Poetry, of Co. Clare, Ireland.