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An Elegy for a Small DogChloe, you’ve peed on more famous feet than any other dog I’ve ever known, and most of them literary. Even inside Michael Harlow’s leather briefcase where Heraclitus was still arguing with Democritus, better to laugh than to cry, wouldn’t you say, now that you’ve sprouted wings and flown away with all those other ochre-fanged Rennaissance angels. You tore up the precious project, you whirled and growled like a mad aunt, you twisted away from a quick slap, you tried to throttle the hose-snake. You grew fat on cashew nuts, chocolate and smoked chicken. You shared the Fear of all small dogs of being stood on. You never knew your place. Your grey-bearded little loon face appears in every single photograph we’ve taken over the last sixteen years in a series of beautiful gardens. Curled up in Graham Lindsay’s Moses basket, (may Wigor rest in peace) you looked like a geriatric Miss Muffet in a dainty bonnet. I’d swing you in it carefully from place to place in the sun. Now, my darling, shivering little fillet of flesh, you’re gone. Arise, O citizens of Bluff. Lift up, each one of you, a glass of Guinness with a plumped oyster-eye swimming in it. And when I say when, shout ‘ Slainte! To Chloe, who was neither fair, nor sweet smelling, nor slim, but a very good little creature. Amen.’
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