Old Friends Home for Retired Racehorses
I went to the farm of retired racehorses,
long necks reaching over the
planks to snap at the air, or cribbing
at their fences with long hot faces, graceful,
tired, and irritable in the June-hot summer.
I walked into the fields, feeling
shy as the youngest boy in our group,
only four-foot-tall and urged by his dad
to hold the carrots out in his
shaking flat hand—loving in spite
of myself his fat dad, in army pants
and impenetrable shades, for the way he
stroked their faces, stood up to them when
no else would, suggesting a life lived
with animals, confident and exact,
like a man surprising his wife, asking
her, after decades, to dance.
I went to the farm of retired racehorses,
listening as the guide told us of how
they’d been kept in stalls twenty-two hours per
day so they’d confuse speed with freedom
as they bolted down the track—how,
no longer able to race, they’d been
sold for slaughter, then saved
by a journalist from Boston who had
an idea: to give them these green-
brown fields, this long afternoon.
I went to the farm of retired racehorses,
and was glad I had come, loving how
I’m Charismatic leads blind and biting
Rapid Redux to feed, how violent Amazombie
is given two goats like two wives to
shush and calm him, to precede
like an honor guard as he steps from the
truck, how Silver Charm—their most
famous horse—runs up to the fence with
a halt and flourish to greet us, like a boy
on a motorcycle showing his skill,
or a freedom fighter after liberating his
people, torn still between strife and this
moment in which he can’t quite believe
this sighing in the grass and nothing to do,
his shadow stretched thin and riderless.
Georgetown, Kentucky