Correct Weight

Jaya Savige

Camouflaged against the smug mahogany

of the Red Lion in Westminster,

the sitting member drains his knockoff Stella –

beyond the bronze Churchill disingenuous

tourists mumble hymns for free

         entry to the abbey – and wonders

whether in Australia, like the constellations,

everything is upside down: a world replete

with Swift’s Houyhnhnms, where beasts scold

men – centaurs gripping Lapiths by the throat –

         rather than the other way around.

It’s said their beer is best served icy cold.

Glancing like Orpheus at the underground,

something in him clicks like a starting gate

when the riders are finally set: how being

clenched between the buttocks of a thoroughbred

         could be a kind of noble anonymity.

In such a place, one might take the features

of their betters – equine face, parted mane,

shoulders sloping gracefully beneath

a shiny coat – and, despite the yahoos reveling

in their fetters, or perhaps because of them,

come also to love the raw heat

of being flogged toward the post;

         or if not, enough at least to stay in it

to the last, for the will to not diminish,

to leap out of the ground and take it by a nose

in a controversial photo finish –

         and see off the protest at the weigh in.
 

Jaya Savige (QLD) is currently writer-in-residence at the B.R. Whiting Library, Rome. His recent collection of poems, Latecomers (UQP 2005) was the winner of the 2006 Kenneth Slessor Prize (NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry).

Correct Weight was written by Jaya Savige in response to William Dobell’s Portrait of a strapper 1941 in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery collection.