​​In the midst of his famed experiments
(buzzer or tuning fork, food, salivation),
the Neva one night overflowed its banks
and the basement lab filled with icy water
as Pavlov’s dogs fruitlessly sought escape
from a tide they could hear and scent,
well before the flood reached muzzles,
long before sunlight might warm fur.

Hurriedly returning to the laboratory,
he caught their howling from the street
and found his dogs in states of shock:
some squatting in sodden straw, others
hunched frozen against the grey cages.
A wolfish lean mutt bayed in a frenzy;
a husky mix repeatedly rocked in place;
a mastiff he especially liked bit her bars.

Later on, the behaviorist was to observe
differing responses to quick movements
or sudden noises. Doors slammed shut
could, for example, elicit rage in Lady,
cowering in Jurka, in Joy despondency.
So, his subjects would live out their lives, 
as he scrupulously recorded how each
bore the aftereffects of that inching flood.

I read no further, and yes, never learn
what he concluded about human trauma,
nor how that knowledge may enlighten
our too-readily enlightened age. Rather,
I skip ahead to Pavlov’s own biography,
his alarm at the rising tide of Marxism
(“for which I would not give a frog’s hind leg”),
and his last illness, double pneumonia.

Wishing a study of the final hours, he asked 
a student to record, by guttering candles,
all the tell-tale somatic signs: shortening, 
quickening, slowing of the breath; rattle
of uncleared respiratory mucus; duration
of fevers; pupil dilations; distress of any kind— 
as if Mortality itself were somehow dictating.
What was worth the vigil? No notes survive.

Of course, given the wars, it is astonishing 
Pavlov’s lab was ever preserved at all, 
its black and white portraits of mangy dogs
hanging where someone long ago put them,
bearing names still legible in inked script:
Baikal. Ikar. Jack. Bierka. Big Boy. Thief. 
I look into their eyes, saying the names aloud.
But the water rises, and there is no relief. 

---

Brian Culhane’s poetry has appeared in such journals as The Hudson Review, PN Review, Plume, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. His book, The King’s Question (Graywolf, 2008), won the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson Award for a first book from a poet over 50. His second collection, Remembering Lethe, was recently released by Able Muse Press.