The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring

dedicated to Zimi and Leo Rosten

In Mesopotamia in March, why are the wild dogs multicolored,

Why the hues?

What news is broadcast in the land

From broadsides on their pelts?

Snow melts, the tender green comes up,

The shut skies open wide,

The first rains glide and fall

As gently as the voices of the mourning doves which call

And summon forth the rambling dogs of spring

To run in search of nothing or some thing,

Which, lost, bespeaks itself in wildest flowering.

It’s then the pollens sift like incense to immure

Their drifting colored substance in dog-fur.

The brutes bang by with firecracker barks

To roll in flower-beds for simple larks,

And take the color red and hennaed are

From wildest flower near or flower far,

And head home tinted blue as Helen’s eye

Or golden as Troy’s shields, Apollo’s sky,

Or brown as any dirge-flower left behind

From funeral of Homer, buried blind.

With tails like guidon-flags the spring dogs run

All piebald dyes and tints toward sunset gun;

Now azure, agate-furred, now crimson-red,

The beasts in smiling mobs make off for bed

And midnight trot like rainbows up the stairs

To nuzzle-tincture children unawares.

Then, colored much like Indians whose slumbers

Are dyed to saffron, gentian, and burnt umbers,

The children rise like smoking fires that cool

And, printed with flower inks, dog off to school.