We dueled rake handles in the tack room shadows,
There by the magazine of mallets and spurs,
Tins painted with a thoroughbred's Derby pose
Lacing the smells of hay and urine with camphor.
Mud daubers spit-and-pasted Quonset chateaus
Where swallows dipped through summer's furnace door,
And the dirt floor quaked when in a heated chukka
the ponies charged the barn-end goal like thunder.
The barn was stacked with bales clear to the eaves,
And where their stagger left slim corridors
We tunneled courses on our hands and knees.
A sudden rat was as good as a Minotaur.
Astride the fence, we tracked our father's jerseys;
Beneath the stands, eavesdropped on chatting mothers,
Loosened to the high cackles by daiquiris.
The wheeling mounts, the whip of mallets, the blur
And weave of scrimmage made an elegant war.
But we slipped off before the final pistol
To wade the creek that ran beside the grounds,
Roots laddering to glassy sun-streaked pools
And moss-backed rocks beneath which crawdads crowned
With jellied eyes and red antennae, cruel
Claws big as lobsters', we thought, faced us down.
Black and red feathers fanned to a paisley swirl
In one pool where a Leghorn rooster had drowned--
A kaleidoscopic eddy turning round.
Cut loose, clueless, we played the cock-and-bull
Of fathers who to us seemed Minotaurs.
Young men beyond their means, not long from school,
Their mortgaged businesses an elegant war
For which weekend mock chivalry was cruel
Reward, they swapped and then divorced the mothers.
But we slipped off before the final pistol
Like whiffs of hay and urine laced with camphor
And disappeared through summer's furnace door.
(First appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, spring 2007.)
Jeffrey will be reading at the Cannon Mine in Lafayette, Thursday, May 8th, with Sigman Byrd, from Boulder. See calendar for details!