#MIDDLEBURY
Bray
Christopher Salerno
It’s summer here so soda pop and blue
jeans in the trees. I am peeling
my sunburn on a bus bound for Saratoga
Springs where I will lob my father’s
ashes on the line where the racehorses
finish one at a time, and as they do,
the mist of a million particles
of ash in the air, all likeness will disappear
between us. I had built a boundary
out of skin where I sat quietly
until blood was the only moving
thing on a map of where we are.
On the dirt track, horses fill
their lungs in the sun and urge on.
When a losing horse dips
its head to greet me, his black whiskers
tickle the flesh of my neck. Why
do all hearted creatures stink?
I am asked by my brother’s
youngest child, Is horse your favorite
or least favorite mammal? I say
don’t beg the Lord if the sky is
a gray roof beneath which
you have waited all day to see
gallop something graceful, swift.
About this poem
“My dad loved to bet the horses, and Saratoga was his favorite track. The summer after his sudden death, I traveled upstate to take in a few races with my brother and his kids. After the fifth or sixth race, I snuck up to the finish line fence with a Dixie cup full of dad’s gravelly ashes, giving them a good fling onto the track. The horses ran so hard through his dust and their own dust – it was all I could ask for from the moment.” – Christopher Salerno
About Christopher Salerno
Christopher Salerno is the author of “Sun & Urn” (University of Georgia Press, 2017). He is an associate professor at William Paterson University and lives in Caldwell, N.J.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Christopher Salerno. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
