After Degas’s Leaving the Paddock
They're being led into the track,
one jockey in a mud-orange
jacket, the other in dark blue,
donning a scarlet cap. They clip
and clop from the paddock slowly.
We hear the daylights in that crowd
of onlookers who can hardly
believe their luck. How maybe they’ll
forever get to feel this tamed
violence that drips like sweat from
the broad haunches of a single
bobtailed afternoon, this instant
saddled to a runaway that
powers them toward the moment
they crave and away from it just
the same, as if the rhythm of
time could be kept by hooves, the grace
of a horse's step not taken,
the fortune of going nowhere
and still somehow rounding the start—
NOTE: On March 18, 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was subject to
perhaps the most notorious art robbery in history. Degas’s Leaving the Paddock painting was
among the masterpieces stolen.