On a windswept beach where every human has retreated indoors, a small dog has the whole shoreline to himself. D. L. Emblen's "Playboy" is a single snapshot, a few seconds of pure canine joy, and it ends by sneaking a joke and a small observation about human nature into the last line. What looks like a simple scene of a dog chasing birds turns out to be a portrait of appetite, vanity and freedom, all of them rolled into one body.
The poem starts quietly, almost like a stage direction: "A small dog on the beach." Then the camera pulls back and fills in the setting, "the long, deserted beach of Neptune Place." The word "deserted" matters, because the dog's freedom depends on everyone else's absence. The wind has "driven bathers from the surf, from the sand bank, from the porches of homes along the street," a list that moves steadily inward, from water to sand to the very doorsteps of houses, as if the weather were clearing a stage. The same wind that sends people running is what hands the dog his empire.
The most striking image in the scene is the half-buried rocks, "thick flat rocks lie buried in the sand, / tossed ashore, abandoned sculpture from an unknown island." Here the beach turns into a gallery. The rocks are accidents of the sea, yet Emblen dignifies them as "sculpture," and sculpture that has been "abandoned," which gives the empty beach a faint melancholy, a sense of things cast off and left behind. Against that stillness, the dog is all motion. Notice how the poem's language shifts the moment he takes over: "vibrant, frantic body" has a nervous, buzzing energy, and the repeated sounds of "barking and grinning" almost let us hear him.
That grin is worth pausing on. Dogs don't literally grin for an audience, but Emblen gives him one, and with it a personality. The dog is "showing off his vibrant, frantic body to the waves," performing for the only spectators available, the sea itself. There is something gloriously silly about this, a creature so pleased with himself that he plays to an ocean. The birds, meanwhile, are named with a naturalist's precision, "seagulls and curlews and sandpipers," and described as "shrill-voiced," so that the chase becomes a noisy, crisscrossing argument between barking and screeching.
The poem's structure mirrors the chase. It is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular rhythm, and the lines swell and shrink without warning. The long, sprawling line about the wind and the porches slows us down and widens the view, while the short lines, "barking and grinning," snap along at the dog's pace. The syntax does the work of the dog's legs, too: "wheeling from one shrill-voiced bird to another" is a phrase that itself seems to spin and change direction. The whole poem is essentially one long sentence of motion followed by a single, sharp comparison.
That comparison arrives in the final line: "like a man with many loves." It reframes everything that came before, and it is also the source of the title. The dog is a playboy, darting from one object of desire to the next, never catching any of them and never wanting to. The simile is funny, but it is not simply mocking. The poem has just called his run "perfect freedom," and the playboy image suggests that this freedom is intoxicating precisely because it is uncommitted, with every bird as exciting as the last. There is gentle irony in comparing an innocent animal to a human philanderer, and it lets the poem raise an uncomfortable question: is what we call vanity and restlessness in people simply the same instinct, only less honest than a dog's?
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Emblen doesn't lecture. He gives us wind, rocks, birds and a dog, and trusts a single simile to carry the idea. The result is a miniature that is playful on the surface and quietly sly underneath, a poem about how much joy, and how much foolishness, can fit inside one small, grinning body on an empty beach.