Thursday, November 08, 2012

Winning, losing, and plain dumb luck!

Nothing like reading a poem after all the drama of a close election or a championship game, where there can be only one winner at the end of it all. 
I wish I could listen to James Earl Jones or Harry Belafonte reading aloud the following poem...

Dumb Luck
Corey Marks
 
The horse—its number smudged
by sweat and thumbs nuzzling
 

predictable exactas
stamped in black—stumbles
 

at the last, run too hard, run
beyond what her ankles could bear,
 

and the jockey, who’d driven
her ahead of the other horses
 

now churning past and flinging
back rings of dust, rides
 

her down, out of the grace
and rush of the race and into the hoof-
 

torn dirt, the shit and grit
and the shudder he’s lost control of...
 

Then another rush: people
flurry to the fallen animal, the jockey
 

is raised, stunned and still
he feels he’s moving—something roils
 

in him, around him, under him.
Words are inconsequential
 

as flies. Dumb luck.
The animal won’t rise.
 

Nearby, the winner paces,
cooling, saddled now with the reason
 

for the day, heavy chest
widening against his rider’s approval,
 

each breath ragged and expendable
and replaceable as the printed bets
 

that drift the grounds, skittering
between knuckles of grass
 

beneath the stands where people
stare, the ones who got it wrong,
 

used to seeing what doesn’t come,
to wagering chances bound to be
 

nothing, nothing, nothing
but lost. Though someone got it right
 

and smacks his ticket
against his palm, exactly sure
 

of what it bears. He looks away
as the crowd around him cranes
 

and gawks into the afterlife
of chance—a white truck,
 

a man with an open-mouthed kit.
A needle. A hurtling world
 

closes like a gate.


The Threepenny Review
Fall 2010
Source(ht)

1 comment:

Ramesh said...

In the bad old days, it was simply a shot. Now its a needle. And that's considered a humane act ....