ISSUE: Spring 2000
On my last day at the Daily Racing Form
Aman the Director, from Iran,
celebrated with sandwiches.
I had documented track-data processing
for Phoenix and Lexington.
Until now I had told no one I wrote.
And Taiwanese Robert confessed:
he preferred programs to people,
since computers are dependable.
And Sean, the Bei Jing manager said:
only the rich had time for poems,
how great, if you did what you wanted.
And Aman was fluent in English,
but did not “feel” English poems.
And his daughter knew Persian,
but was puzzled by the mathematician Khayyam.
And Aman corrected my pronunciation
of Rubaiyat, whose quatrains, he said,
are like quadratic equations;
and that Rumi said that we are pieces of God.
Thus, on my last day at the Daily Racing Form,
I was taught poetics.
As each day, to and from work,
the train lights on the white wall tiles
had taught me briefly of the light.
How each might face transcendence.
