The Much Love Sad Dog Trip

Matthew Sadler

Bubble Wrap and Packing Foam

And what did you do with yourself today? The sun
closes its empty eyelids, the unemployment line breaks for a meal,

the janitor jangles his giant ring of keys. Doesn’t it seem he could unlock
anything? Why doesn’t he go into the vault and come out wealthy?

Can he at least tell you what you’re trying to unlock? You watch
with disinterested attention as the skeleton of a culture is laid open

one careful fistful at a time. The hearth a scattering of broken ceramic,
the fired clay colored ground mustard seed and pomegranate.

And what do you learn about your life? Do you walk across the cold rail bridge
toward home, kicking stones through the vertiginous slats,

lit by the subtle grace of inspiration? Did you pay your respects?
Your insurance bills? Say yes to yourself even once?

At the whale museum, I pass through a giant rib they’ve made into a door,
into the soft plush of the gallery, unscathed

but digested in some important way.
Is it wonder or reverence that opens my heart and my wallet

and I’ll buy a sweatshirt and some postcards, please.
And if we are related to that first scaled dog that drug itself out of the sea,

that would explain our awkwardness and our grace, our eczema, our gills.
Someone found one off a coast somewhere, now chest pinned open,

studied and explained. But I want everything explained, all at once if possible.
Dissect the coffee shop and the wormy dirt, label each node of the brain,

walk along the terminal moraines of our existence and expertise.
Feeling unbeatable, I pop into the video store and buy the special edition extended play

double platinum directors cut. You go back to your office and dream of surgical heroism,
of inventing a giant plug for the giant hole everyone’s talking about.

Then you get back to your work. What else can you do but participate?
And hope, when you come home and the mail comes, there’s a package

with your name on it? And don’t you wrap yourself up in a package every day
only to deliver yourself to your own doorstep at 6, or if you’re lucky,

someone else’s doorstep, of if you’re luckier,
your own with someone else inside who loves you? And don’t you tear yourself open

together each night, dig through your guts, both expecting, above all else,
to find something good in there?

ISBN 1-59661-145-6
64 pages/$9

For once, the innocence of youth is allowed almost equal time with the irony that takes up so much of our air these days. It's Matt Sadler's ability to balance the two that makes me feel sure he is a new and strong voice in the making. There's a tenderness of heart and mind, a deep gaiety that lurks in even his most serious work.
--Patricia Goedicke

Emerson could have been thinking about Matthew Sadler when he compared writing poetry to ice skating, because you are often taken to places you didn't exactly intend to go. These poems glide from one thing-time-place to another driven only by the sheer trust this poet has in this poet has in his imaginative process.
--Billy Collins

Matt Sadler's The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio oscillates between letters to the world and interrogations of the self. The poet lays out the impulse of the collection in the first poem, with a speaker urgently proclaiming, "But I want everything explained, all at once if possible." Yet these poems veer away from claims in favor of questions, which often accumulate with the admirable tenacity we've come to associate with the innocent information-seeking of children. This is not to suggest the poems are childish; rather, they have made a commitment to cultivate awe, to ask for answers, to believe deeply in the possibility of responsiveness--between poetry and the world, between person and person.
--Kristi Maxwell,
author of Realm Sixty-Four

Matthew Sadler holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He has published work in such journals as Salt River, Versal, Poetry East, and Passages North. His work has been recognized by the University of Arizona Foundation, MetroTimes, and The Poetry Center of Chicago. He is currently a faculty member at the Detroit Country Day School. He lives in the Detroit area with his wife and daughters.