Et In Arcadia Ego

by T.S. Kerrigan

Idylls at Santa Anita Racetrack
in Arcadia, California

Arcadia? I’ve been there too,
Though not the highlands Pan once knew,
Those sylvan groves of laurel, pine
Where satyrs, dryads intertwine,

But down among the lakes and flowers
Where handicappers fret for hours.
I’d go back go home, the races run,
And check how much I’d lost or won.

Whenever I amassed a pile,
Sweet Amaryllis flashed a smile.
She’d see my face and always knew
I’d won the stakes and claimers too.

We’d look in one another’s eyes
Outdoors beneath those classic skies,
Where summer nights are always warm,
And share The Daily Racing Form.

18
August, 2011

The second son of a postman, T.S. Kerrigan grew up in Los Angeles, Brecht and others’ vision of hell, from whence he has never been able to escape. He attended the University of California and Loyola University School of Law. At the end of a long legal trial and appelllate career, he argued successfully in the United States Supreme Court to preserve a statute enacted during the Great Depression to protect workers. He was invited to read his poems at Poetry on the Lake in the Italian Alps in 2009 (http://www.poetryonthelake.org/). His latest and largest collection is My Dark People (Central Avenue Press, 2008) which, Lewis Turco claims in a recent review in The Hollins Critic, contains poems that rival A.D. Hope’s.

« Previous

[ Show menu ]