Totalizator

The racing room is printed out
with abstract poems of throroughbred names,
and every day revised editions
construct their metaphors, numbered and priced:

Like a Martian
Force of Nature
La La Land
Our Desert Flower

It’s here one thing is never proved
between humans and Pavlov horses—-
that most popular is always best.
Barely 10% at race day end,
and paid for here in anyone’s language,
but true gambler tongue, with only money.

Breeding comes to nothing beside the paper
achievement’s written on:
a three year old by Yeats (the sire)
couldn’t stand out among the others.
Nor the local breds who come from last
then stump and stagger back between the failures.

Yeats (the poet) made the following sense:
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
Yeats (the horse’s son) has a jockey for his clothes,
and old woman with curler-scarf on for a hat, cursing,
“You bag of bones. You dead loss. One pig’s worth ten of you.”