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Show Don’t Tell Portrait: of a Person

Your show don't tell portrait of a person will use all five senses to precisely and originally describe one person doing a specific action that illustrates their personality in a single moment.

In the poems below, notice the specific moments and setting. Notice the vivid sensory details.
But notice also the poet’s reaction to the character presented: one great trick is to set up (describe) expectations,
then break them with a more honest, surprising understanding: a revelation.

The Dog (note: this could also count as a story poem or object portrait)

Except for the dog, that she wouldn’t have him put away, wouldn’t let him die, I’d have liked her.
She was handsome, busty, chunky, early middle-aged, very black, with a stiff, exotic dignity
That flurried up in me a mix of warmth and sexual apprehension neither of which, to tell the truth,
I tried very hard to nail down: she was that much older and in those days there was still the race thing.
This was just at the time of civil rights: the neighborhood I was living in was mixed.
In the narrow streets, the tiny three-floored houses they called father-son-holy ghosts
Which had been servants’ quarters first, workers’ tenements, then slums, still were, but enclaves of us,
Beatniks and young artists, squatted there and commerce between everyone was fairly easy.
Her dog, a grinning mongrel, rib and knob, gristle and grizzle, wasn’t terribly offensive.
The trouble was that he was ill, or the trouble more exactly was that I had to know about it.
She used to walk him on a lot I overlooked, he must have had a tumor or a blockage of some sort
Because every time he moved his bowels, he shrieked, a chilling, almost human scream of anguish.
It nearly always caught me unawares, but even when I’d see them first, it wasn’t better.
The limp leash coiled in her hand, the woman would be profiled to the dog, staring into the distance,
Apparently oblivious, those breasts of hers like stone, while he, not a step away, laboring,
Trying to eject the feeble, mucous-coated, blood-flecked chains that finally spurted from him,
Would set himself on tiptoe and hump into a question mark, one quivering back leg grotesquely lifted.
Every other moment he’d turn his head, as though he wanted her, to no avail, to look at him,
Then his eyes would dim and he’d drive his wounded anus in the dirt, keening uncontrollably,
Lurching forward in a hideous, electric dance as though someone were at him with a club.
When at last he’d finish, she’d wipe him with a tissue like a child; he’d lick her hand.
It was horrifying; I was always going to call the police; once I actually went out to chastise her—
Didn’t she know how selfish she was, how the animal was suffering?—she scared me off, though.
She was older than I’d thought, for one thing, her flesh was loosening, pouches of fat beneath the eyes,
And poorer, too, shabby, tarnished: I imagined smelling something faintly acrid as I passed.
Had I ever really mooned for such a creature? I slunk around the block, chagrined, abashed.
I don’t recall them too long after that. Maybe the dog died, maybe I was just less sensitive.
Maybe one year when the cold came and I closed my windows, I forgot them … then I moved.
Everything was complicated now, so many tensions, so much bothersome self-consciousness.
Anyway, those back streets, especially in bad weather when the ginkgos lost their leaves, were bleak.
It’s restored there now, ivy, pointed brick, garden walls with broken bottles mortared on them,
But you’d get sick and tired then: the rubbish in the gutter, the general sense of dereliction.
Also, I found a girl to be in love with: all we wanted was to live together, so we did.

--C.K. Williams

Person Poem Score Sheet

Yes, I will grade your poem. Here's how. Note the inclusion of criteria from "How to Edit Poetry."