Duke was a dog
With a very strange walk
And he’d cross the saloon oh so slowly.
He’d chew as he walked
And the drift of his talk
Was he’d bite your hand off if you raised it.
His watery eyes
And shaggy old thighs
Didn’t make you see
Past his incisors
And just when you thought
He’d loped past with his throat
Desert dry he’d turn round
And bark: “Remember the Alamo!”
One day in the bar
Duke encountered a fair
Signorita named Lola, a Collie –
He took off his hat
And said, “Ma’am”
That was that
Now they have sixteen pups
round the Red River Valley
If you should see Duke
Sniffing round this back lot
Don’t you worry,
He ain’t got the rabies.
Just that look in his eye
Says the frontier ran dry
And now dogs have to howl
In the movies.
But Duke he don’t mind,
In a saddle he’ll find
Oil and sandalwood
All that you’d sniff in dreams
But he wakes up to find
On the lot where the blinds
Shuttered houses
The horses have fled the fields.
And John Wayne’s retired,
The studio head’s fired
And TV’s the only place left to feel
Wind on the prairie
And Clint Eastwood’s hairy
Wool blanket: the stars are so cold
When you can’t get asleep to dream.
Atar Hadari’s “Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik” (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his debut collection, “Rembrandt’s Bible”, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2013. “Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin” was awarded a Pen Translates grant and is out now from Arc Publications. He contributes a monthly verse bible translation column to MOSAIC magazine.