Bullet Is a Good Name for a Horse

“But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn’t want to waste the tune; it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that.”
—Bob Dylan on “John Wesley Harding,” Rolling Stone (1969)

I told myself it was all right to still love
the gun in old Westerns. Because
it’s maybe six chambers, maybe a small magazine,
and maybe it kills a man, yes, and we write
a song about that, but it’s one man,
or maybe a few, but not fifty-nine people in a dance club
or twenty-seven in an elementary school,
and everyone who dies is fiction, after all.
I told myself it was all right because of all the preparatory clicking,
the theatrics of spinning and drawing,
that built-in escape time. Because today
no headline is about the Winchester.
Because once I sang “John Wesley Harding” as a lullaby
to myself, sweet lilt of how he traveled
with a gun in every hand, and felt tall-booted,
fierce-spurred. I wanted to be horseback.
I wanted to be outlaw. I was young
and thought a song could be a talisman.
Like if I wore a raincoat of rifles-
in-verse, I could walk through a shoot-out unscathed.
Forgive me. I know a jamming six-round
pistol still killed some mother’s son.
I know raincoats work best when made
of vinyl, or nylon, or gabardine—
unromantic fabric, dull as legislation.
Dylan added the “g” to John Wesley Hardin’s name
by mistake, or maybe because he wanted
ka better story, one unfettered by facts.
He chose the name because
it fit the tempo he’d already written.
He had no idea, he told the interviewer,
what his song was about.