HORSES

What's this I hear
about you failing
again to get near
enough to the railing

to fall overboard and drown?
It's hard sometimes to own
one's own success,
much less

the success that somebody else's.
Trying to take the pulses
of people with hearts
that race puts, I feel, a number of carts

before an equal number of horses.
And then we die, of courses.