The Race Poem by William Rose Benet

Your pursed lips suddenly sucked in a sound that your horse
Leapt to. He tossed his head and stretched his muzzle,
Hauling the reins, and started off at a canter.
Riding astride in your heavy McClellan saddle,
With straight flat back—in white shirtwaist and high white stock
And black cocked hat—you wavered against the hills,
On that broad white road, a clear, clean flame to me,
Blowing into the glory of the sun
Over the marshes.

Caleppit—caleppit—caleppit!
The hoofs of my horse rang out in sudden pursuit
Little puffs of dust like shots from gnomish rifles
Followed your horse's flying heels. The road
Rose and fell before us, as over a ridge
By a ranch we clattered, and slanted around a curve
Where a sheep-dog barked from a byre. The high sun moved
Following us.

I saw you sling your quirt
Lightly over the flank of the reaching roan,
And the easy cradle-motion beneath me told
How my horse was nearing a run.
The wind from the Straits
Came slashing into our faces. The dusty road,
Hard under hoof, racketed with our flight.
A dooryard fluttered orange poppies. A team
Drew into the dusty, bitten border grass
To watch us by. A winding herd of cows
Stopped to stare from a mounded hill, in the cloak-spread shadow
Of crooked live-oaks. Out on that strip of steel,
Beyond the marshes, some veering red-brown sails
Of Portuguese fishermen made for a ramshackle pier.
The hills, like a humping school of porpoises,
Kept pace with us on the left, and luring white
The road ran on before.

A stretch of sand
Muffled the hoofs, and seemed to check us. Then
Caleppit—caleppit—caleppit! again. And neither gaining ...
Pursuer, pursued, and all a flowing illusion!

You rode in a cloud, and I in a cloud. We moved
Like the wistful-tinging sunlight of afternoon
That glinted far out on the slowly-turning wings
Of an inland-drifted gull. And high and still
A dark hawk hovered. Our eyes, astare with speed,
Dilated into a bright indifferent sky.

And then you pulled on the reins, and I tugged, and the horses,
Snorting and sweating, were wrestled back to a trot,
And we laughed 'and ambled along in companionship
While I was thinking, 'I wonder if she is the One?'
And you, perhaps, 'I really wonder if he?'
Both meanwhile talking scattered half-chaffing things,
One of your leather gauntlets busied about your hair,
I fumbling in my khaki coat for a pipe,
Each in youth's calm pursuit
Of a magnificent and mateless dream!