BELMONT STAKES, 1973
Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes,
Planet-shaking meteors, the preposterously intense
Furnaces of suns.
Things measurable:
Equations represent them.
600 million tons of hydrogen fused to helium
Every second in the depths of our sun
(Unremarkable among suns):
Numbers that numb a mind.
But what ignites a heart
Has no measure.
In 1970 (so we count our planet’s travels,
Cued to the affairs of men),
Was born a horse more than animal
Drawn to a hidden star
Impelled by forces
That threw even coldly calculating oddsmakers
Into speechlessness.
Needing a name,
As we use names to hang our dreams on,
Humans named this presence
Secretariat.
A prosaic tag
Slapped on the transcendent.
No matter: in the end
Any name for him would have gathered wonder,
As a mountain gathers storms.
To some of certain generations such as mine,
This name evokes
A catch in the throat,
A warmth spreading
From chest to shoulders,
Where it meets a tingle descending
From the back of the skull.
The word Secretariat conjures a vision—
A memory, a dream?
In the home stretch of the Belmont Stakes:
A thing of grace and fury, like a wave
Arisen foaming far from land,
Seething shoreward, lashing the waters
With wild yet rhythmic surges—
A tempest balled up in horse form.
What tide lifted this beast
Into the realm of fable?
The roaring crowd? Pride? Ambition?
A debt to trainers, stable hands, jockey?
A pure joy of speed?
Or a resolve,
If scaled down to merely human thought,
Would say simply: “I will do this.”
The jockey said it was Secretariat’s decision,
A thing no thinking human would have dared.
Seeing Secretariat and his challenger,
(Bold Sham, to be outdone by greatness doubled),
The two alone raging into the far turn,
The cognoscenti predicted
The too-hot flame would burn out far from home.
But more fuel came from a source
Untapped by mortals.
Then Secretariat, alone,
Flashed into the homestretch
Like a squall of fire.
After an unreckoned span of time
Sham and the rest
Hurtled into the stretch:
With all their highborn excellence
Clawing against the cage
Of a toy universe,
Purporting to pursue the prodigy—
The latter twenty-two lengths and widening ahead:
Two hundred feet of dirt
Become a gulf between two worlds.
To a hungry nation,
This breakage of unthought-of bounds
Was a bolt of glory.
To Secretariat
A side effect.
What really drove the horse,
Invisible to reason, elusive as dark matter,
Remains unnamed by us,
Then, now, and ever.