All Mine

By Peter Mladinic

Our pups are all perfect souls. --Gerald Parker

Some remember the Fred Paris and the Five
Satins a cappella song on Swingin Slim’s
Times Square label, the 45 disc’s label
black with Times Sq scroll in orange. 
Vinyl red or green or yellow where the song
came from, a change from black vinyl, 
something to brighten a turntable. 
Music historian Marv Goldberg remembers.

I like the part where they sing “I’ve got you
on my mind; tempo shifts, gets staccato,
before the Satins resume a lilt that starts
and ends a song I link with the Covid 
pandemic.  Fred Paris recently passed, old
age, or maybe Covid that claimed many
elderly. Five Satins, Connecticut crooners,
their “All Mine” on my mind, as is the start

of Covid in the USA, everyone indoors.
Streets quiet, quieter than before Covid. 
Oddly peaceful. Don’t go out in a crowd,
avoid gatherings. A fall afternoon, I hoisted
a poodle-spaniel onto the passenger seat
of my Wrangler, brighter orange than Slim’s
label, black trim. I drove to a gravel lot,
opened the passenger door and the dog,

I don’t recall if I lifted down or got down 
on his own, but recall his looking up at me,
light in that pair of dark eyes, canine 
elation.  So happy, that “perfect soul,”
to be where he was, to walk off leash, sniff,
wander a path, a golf course perimeter.
It’s that moment before we started, the dog
looking up, the light in his eyes, stays 

in mine, in some part of me. My favorite, 
if you will, Covid moment, three years past. 
It never got better than that, that was good.
It stays with me. For a long time I thought 
that dog my dog, all mine. As things happen,
as restaurants opened and fewer people 
wore masks, I changed, our one-on-one 
on the path around the golf course

a thing of the past.  Maybe it’s a Pavlovian 
thing of rewards.  I didn’t take the dog out
like that anymore, and he drifted from me, 
still at my side but not like that day.
I was in Slim’s shop in a subway arcade 
off Times Square.  “All Mine” on gold vinyl
spun on a turntable, Five Satins harmony. 
I recall light in those eyes looking up at me.

Peter Mladinic’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is forthcoming from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA.