The Last Race at Auteuil Hippodrome

With a gait like the electrocution of autumn,
the gaskin, the cannon, the fetlock, the pastern,
all defibrillator-jittery, 
their eight-ball eyes offering not pithy

prognoses, but a primordial omen
amaranthine in its scintillation,
as if death’s eggs are planted there, rightly
magisterial with such custody,

and giddy to bust their circulation
escaping with such a Mephistophelian installation
around the concentric construction,

while punters with pen-stricken pockets duly
snort at their susceptibility
to the whiplash of probability.