Money and the Flying Horses

Intriguing, the oaten seethe
of thoroughbred horses in single stalls
across a twilit cabin.

Intimate, under the engines’ gale,
a stamped hoof, a loose-lip sigh,
like dawn sounds at track work.

Pilots wearing the bat wings
of intercontinental night cargo
come out singly, to chat with or warn

the company vet at his manifests:
four to Dubai, ten from Shannon,
Singapore, sixteen, sweating their nap.

They breed in person, by our laws:
halter-snibbed horses, radiating over the world.
Under half-human names, they run in person.

We dress for them, in turn. Our officer class
fought both of its world wars in riding tog:
Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht in their jodhpur pants.

Stumbling turbulence, and the animals
skid, swivelling their large eyes
but iron-hoofed rear-outs calmed by revolver shot

are a rarity now, six miles above
the eventing cravat, the desert hawking dunes.
Handlers move among the unroofed stalls.

They’re settling down, Hank:
easy to tell, with stallions;
they must be the nudest creatures alive —

Tomorrow, having flown from money to money
this consignment will be trucked and rested
then, on cobble, new hands will assume the familiar

cripple-kneed buttock-up seat
of eighteenth-century grooms
still used by jockeys