The Mind of the Thoroughbred Racing
I’ve tested the furlong and although the photographer has proven
my legs lift at once, I am tied to ground. Still, inside the muscles
of my flight, not a single hand can touch me. Later the pressure of the curry brush
comes from far away, later other bodies rearing. He opens my mouth
with a thumb. Sometimes I agree to his imagination, and he does,
above my back, with his hand curled around my mane, own me. Sometimes I,
while he sweats, am in my mind jumping the turnstiles, circling the tether.
At night in the still dark, I dream again that voice, saying:
We own our dead while the dead across the water we let languish;
Therefore, to diminish a lover, put water between you: preferably a sea,
preferably the bulk of a long river, but at least a lake or a chilled glass.
From his pacing in the stables, while they fasten my bit, I know he watches
the faces on the news eagerly, waiting for the return of one
he is tied to in something more than blood. I’ve no such distractions
from this world. I travel with a blanket and tack, with his boots and the dust
that wears into the whorl of my short hair. The track doesn’t change, but one day
I run it as if in a field and free, and the next as if beside my mother as she fell
over leg then under the gun’s crack. From his body against my flank,
I can tell if I am stabled or running. From the ruin he makes
of my gait, if I should heave my body to shore.
Meditations II
Call the beautiful what the barbarians, resurrected, would choose.
Imagine loving-kindness descending over you in a thin shower:
powdered sugar tapped through the sieve by your mother to coat all your flesh.
At the ballet, I choreograph dances inside snow globes. I emerge in heat:
a sugared thing, red and silvered tinsel in the store windows. If the sugar hardens
into shell, you crack yourself with every pirouette and arabesque.
I resurrect you in my head, pull you rotting from the grave: Barbarian. Beautiful.
Coat you in camel hair, dusted by snow. Corpse flower, make you centerpiece.
One of us on the mirrored gurney under our mother’s sieves. One of us heating
the oven. Stop the rot inside your life with dry ice, good thoughts. Head as fridge:
pancreas and feet in butcher paper, packaged sorrow. Freeze, freeze this
away. Imagine happiness at your door with red balloons pulsing,
with twelve hearts pulsing on a silvered tray. Be well. Bury the barbarians
in the new year’s cake and open the mirrored ballerina’s box. Let the beautiful
in you sleep in another woman’s bed. Resurrect his pale flesh inside her arms.