The Horses: New & Selected Poems

Belmont ’78

27 belmonT ’78 I New York New York again driving in gritty yellow air through the clear time passing Danny and I who had known each other half our lives the furtive princely sons of Jewish mothers still running for our pleasure Driving through the Barrio 115th St. and Spanish Harlem on our way to the Belmont Stakes As if we drove down the bones of old romances “I used to do social work in this neighborhood, Rich . . . Used to make love to my clients . . .” Danny hanging sidewise, snake eyes, furioso his cigarette clenched between his teeth romance of blackness fierce rolling women soul, electric salsa, broken glass straight-on surging of that poor angry blood so seductive to us interior middle-class darters only we weren’t kids anymore but men scrabbling in deep water and outside the romance was gone of lives caged to a few square blocks 28 flattened like scrap or baling wire in the infernal machines empty store fronts stale wine breath strutting and hard laughter at the core of a dying star Danny and I talking women, money, races in our closed moving cell like two heads of the same fear he hanging tight as a wart in the city of his birth I escaped a continent away veined by phone calls and jet planes to the anxious stone beebop of the city And here crossing the bridge Randall’s Island floating in the East River Manhattan State Hospital passing on our right squat fearsome buildings rising tan and blunt as hog’s teeth That had been another of our romances we Jewish schoolboys working as psychiatric attendants in the brilliant twisted inner jungle the zoo garbage hospital for the poor people of Manhattan island 29 sadness and terror of who was still there which of our patients as if the time had stopped fifteen years of jellied animal eyes, devil eyes, dead eyes imploding flesh falling to the still helpless center and behind it the whale itself stretching to the north and south theaters, embassies, publishing houses the tiny jagged buildings like erector sets unnaturally clear in the sulfurous air countless tiny people juxtaposed like planets stacked in cubes Leviathan the humped island of Mind fading to our backs as we chattered over the racing form fading as we chattered on the past and I remembered dreams I had as a child of the humming beast seen from the inside all the heads connected to the subway dragon spine power junctions rumbling down beneath the island the lemur furnaces the secret dynamos 30 II Belmont Park spread flying for miles in a peaceful ellipse wide green circus of fields and ponds candy-striped tents groves of trees and jets roaring over thousands of well-heeled people twittering rustling their racing forms betting on the horses As if the day shifted on translucent gears of beauty and quick money and the animals how they floated onto the track behind the bugle nervous flaring thoroughbreds stepping up and back before the stands anchored to their firm squatty little exercise ponies floated out in colors round the curve jittering one by one into the starting gate and “They’re off!” the hard clear straining tiny monkey men in silks like a Grecian frieze an Assyrian lion hunt on TV 31 Danny and I still getting by love boys once again here at the hot center glowing at each other as if our lives leapt upon these pearls of pleasure strung through emptiness losing and collecting under the sky in radioactive green Flushing, NY JFK airport whistling over beer and food convivial New York tippling from coast to coast All building toward the Stakes effervescence expectation of Belmont ’78 the third and longest test for Alydar and Affirmed Stevie Cauthen the wonder boy in his shot to sweep And then unbelievably just before the race “The Concorde! The Concorde!” screeching 32 scrowling up into the sky a fierce white bird as big as the moon so big and piercing I felt I could hold it the rippling of its radar muscles giant alphabets clicking together squeeze some shape from History streaming by in every direction like light III When they burst from the gate there came a roar it was like the rolling of a wave and they were running free Affirmed in...