And consequently you lived continually in paradise.

This, in translation, is a poem about a dog by a Swedish poet, Lars Gustafsson. It could be sad but it's a poem full of the wonder of life written as only a Nordic poet could write it. An insight into the seasons and the water and the light and the miraculous. Intelligent and wry. 

The line, "In front of closed doors you lay down and slept sure that sooner or later the one would come who’d open up the door " made this dog owner smile. In the early morning I read it out loud to Sophie who falls asleep across my feet.  It's high summer here and we're avoiding the heat.

Elegy for a Dead Labrador

by Lars Gustafsson

Here there may be, in the midst of summer,

a few days when suddenly it’s fall.

Thrushes sing on a sharper note.

The rocks stand determined out in the water.

They know something. They’ve always known it.

We know it too, and we don’t like it.

On the way home, in the boat, on just such evenings

you would stand stock-still in the bow, collected,

scouting the scents coming across the water.

You read the evening, the faint streak of smoke

from a garden, a pancake frying

half a mile away, a badger

standing somewhere in the same twilight

sniffing the same way. Our friendship

was of course a compromise; we lived

together in two different worlds: mine,

mostly letters, a text passing through life,

yours, mostly smells. You had knowledge

I would have given much to have possessed:

the ability to let a feeling—eagerness, hate, or love—

run like a wave throughout your body

from nose to tip of tail, the inability

ever to accept the moon as fact.

At the full moon you always complained loudly against it.

You were a better Gnostic than I am. And consequently

you lived continually in paradise.

You had a habit of catching butterflies on the leap,

and munching them, which some people thought disgusting.

I always liked it. Why

couldn’t I learn from you? And doors.

In front of closed doors you lay down and slept

sure that sooner or later the one would come

who’d open up the door. You were right.

I was wrong. Now I ask myself, now this

long mute friendship is forever finished,

if possibly there was anything I could do

which impressed you. Your firm conviction

that I called up the thunderstorms

doesn’t count. That was a mistake. I think

my certain faith that the ball existed,

even when hidden behind the couch,

somehow gave you an inkling of my world.

In my world most things were hidden

behind something else. I called you “dog,”

I really wonder whether you perceived me

as a larger, noisier “dog”

or as something different, forever unknown,

which is what it is, existing in that attribute

it exists in, a whistle

through the nocturnal park one has got used to

returning to without actually knowing

what it is one is returning to. About you,

and who you were, I knew no more.

One might say, from this more objective

standpoint, we were two organisms. Two

of those places where the universe makes a knot

in itself, short-lived, complex structures

of proteins that have to complicate themselves

more and more in order to survive, until everything

breaks and turns simple once again, the knot

dissolved, the riddle gone. You were a question

asked of another question, nothing more,

and neither had the answer to the other.