“These are the first days of fall. The wind”
Stephen Dobyns’ “How to Like It” is set in melancholy with “the first days of fall,” the waning of the year, symbolizing the waning of a man’s own life. The autumn-of-life texture is furthered by the fact that the time of day is “evening,” when “smells of roads still to be traveled” come born by “[t]he wind.” The sound of remaining stationary is signified by “the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns.” These implications herald restlessness, making an individual want to jump in his car and “just keep driving.”
“A man and a dog descend their front steps”
The omniscient speaker then introduces the two main actors in this little drama, “a man and a dog”; the dog speaks, ”Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk. / Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.” The speaker confides that this is a dog’s way of “deal[ing] with the prospect of change.”
The highly effective strategy of this poem is the use of the dog’s conversation to represent the man’s baser instincts and physical body. The man remains silent, never speaking, but his thoughts are revealed by the speaker of the poem and the dog. While the dog wants to “get crazy drunk,” the man “is struck / by the oppressiveness of his past.”
The man’s “memories” have become as settled in his mind as he is settled in a neighborhood with a wife and a dog, and he thinks he can see “faces / caught up among the dark places in the trees.” While the man is musing about solidified memories, the dog animalistically interjects, “Let's pick up some girls and just / rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.”
“Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud”
The man glimpsing the clouds rushing across the moon thinks of a movie in which someone is “leaving on a journey.” Noticing the road heading north from his neighborhood, he thinks of driving his car and the dusty smell of the heater after being unused all summer. Even in his mind, he wavers about what he’d really like to do, while the dog suggests they “go down to the diner and sniff / people’s legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.” But the man just thinks, “the road is empty and dark.” Even if he decided to take that journey, he would not find what he is looking for.
“Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder”Still, in his mind the man goes on that journey, but notices, “the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights, / shine like small cautions against the night.” The dog by now just wants to lie down and sleep with his tail over his nose. But the man insists that he wants to continue driving, “crossing / one state line after another, and never stop / until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.”
“Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before”
The man thinks that after a short rest from driving, he will continue and by sundown be rewarded by arriving at “a city entirely new to him.” But the dog, dog-tired by now with all the traveling fantasy, urges the man to go into their house and “not do anything tonight,” and that is what they do. But the man still wonders, “How is it possible to want so many things / and still want nothing?” Because of his frustration with his inability to answer his own questions, he just wants to go to sleep and also repeatedly bang his head into the wall, as he wonders, “Why is it all so difficult?”
“But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich”
The dog wants to make the “tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.” As the man gathers his tall-sandwich fixins, his wife discovers him “staring into the refrigerator.” But he’s not just looking for food, he staring as if he could find answers to his gnawing questions—answers that might reveal to him “why you get up in the morning / and how it is possible to sleep at night, / answers to what comes next and how to like it.”
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