“Or gallop for what must be joy”

All the fuss about American Pharoah [sic] got me thinking about my two favorite race-horse poems. Philip Larkin’s is well-loved and David Hayward’s is obscure (I had to buy a used copy of a 2001 anthology of sports poems in order to read it again), but they have a lot in common: interestingly, they’re both composed of thirty lines arranged in six-line stanzas; they’re both beautifully bittersweet; and they both, in their final lines, use the word “must” movingly and a little bit recklessly. I remember great poems for the same reason I remember great races: their finish.

 

At Grass

By Philip Larkin

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
— The other seeming to look on —
And stands anonymous again.

Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes —

Silks at the start: against the sky
Numbers and parasols: outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass: then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.

Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries —
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,
With bridles in the evening come.

 

***

 

To the Man Saying “Come on Seis” at Hollywood Park

By David Hayward

All the great jockeys were born premature.
Willie Shoemaker spent his first nights in a shoebox incubator
in his grandmother’s oven. He weighed two pounds,
and two years after retiring from the one job
in which an ambulance follows you as you work,
he was paralyzed in a car accident. Terrible

the little gussied-up bodies and terrible for anyone
to want a lawn jockey of his own, with no designs
on any oval, no horse even. At the Silk Hat
arcade in Tokyo, though, to project one’s wishes
onto a tiny plastic white man,
of a piece with his horse and nodding

in his groove to the finish, is to see
the whole world, pylon and Creamsicle,
abbreviated in him. Bee Nun (who, like the other horses,
is all name) comes in at 40 to 1 and the slot gushes tokens
all the doo-dah day, a thousand gentleman
rabbits in coin, eager for use

but redeemable for other tokens only. A closed circuit,
then, unbeautiful as the system of condensation
and rain, with nothing left over, no blanket
of losing tickets over which to walk home, as this man
and I did, done with our words, “Come on Seis,” “Five.
Oh Five. Five,” which were not prayer but “I chose this.”

When we both walked out empty-handed,
our money come to what it really was,
the world — a parking lot littered with wet,
unwanted souvenir clocks — looked to me
the way wreaths of red carnations
must look to the horse who’s won them.