Phar Lap


Unlikely combinations,

Prayer Wheel and Winkie, Sentiment
and Radium: names that contract and expand
like a big heart pumping

till you get an unlikely starter,
this chestnut colt,
foaled in Timaru, October 4 1926,

by Night Raid out of Entreaty,
with Carbine somewhere
in the background.

*

The hide is in Melbourne,
the heart in Canberra.
The bones are in Wellington,

the big delicate skeleton
of a horse
who used to mean business.

*

Can the name
have been planned as a pun?

In English it is one thing.
In Siamese, Lightning.

And they say it means
something in Egyptian.

*

But he was virtually unbeatable,
the big fellow,
winning race after race in Australia
and never fading,

even after they shot at him,
even after they missed,

*

even after he died in America
of intestinal tympany,
of theory after theory . . .

They say that for five days he ate
pasture sprayed with lead arsenate,

they say that his Australian strapper
gave him Fowler’s Solution,
incorrectly mixed,

or maybe even the Mafia . . .

Well, let’s say he died in California,
let’s say he died of absence

*

and that when they stopped talking
they sent him home,
made him articulate
bone by bone

*

till one day up at the Museum,
it might be fifty years later,

wandering along
past the days of pioneer settlement,

I walk past Cook’s cannon
and a case of muskets

and hear a woman sing
in another language

from the far side of Phar Lap’s ribcage.

Reprinted from Collected Poems (Wellington: Victoria UP, 2001)

©Bill Manhire