Rip out and read

Amulet/Abrams' Laura Mihalick gave me a neat book at Midwinter: Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read, compiled by Bruno Navasky, and due out this March. While the book has a sturdy hardcover, its apparent aim is to gradually self-destruct, as the poems within are printed on a scratchpad glued along the top, each page/poem easily removed to "carry with you all day to read, be inspired by, share with others--or keep to yourself." The selections are mainly twentieth century American and free verse; for today, I almost went with Steve Crow's "Revival" (" . . . one wonders / if snow is a wing's / long memory across winter") but settled upon, and ripped out to put in my pocket, Naomi Shihab Nye's "Dog":

[. . . ]
If there were people who loved him,
he remembers them equally,
the one who smelled like smoke,
the one who brought bones from the restaurant.
It is the long fence
of their hoping he would stay
that he has jumped.