No 6 - Analysis

Settling as a kind of devotion

The poem’s central move is to turn an attitude that sounds defeated into something almost reverent: the speaker chooses to settle, and in doing so he finds a quiet, sharpened form of attention. He isn’t chasing spectacle; he’s content with the modest particulars of the track: the 6 horse, a paper cup of coffee, a little way to go. Bukowski makes the word settle do double work. It suggests resignation, but it also suggests a body coming to rest in a place it knows well, like someone lowering themselves into a familiar chair. The speaker’s pleasures are small, but they’re chosen with a blunt honesty.

That honesty is part of the tone: plainspoken, slightly worn, but also unexpectedly tender. The poem doesn’t ask us to admire the speaker; it asks us to stand where he stands and see what he sees.

Rain that makes everything almost alike

The rain is more than background weather; it’s the poem’s way of leveling the world. The speaker watches on a rainy afternoon, and the easy rain makes everything / at once / almost alike. That phrase matters because the racetrack is built on differences: fast and slow, winner and loser, favorite and long shot. Rain blurs those sharp distinctions into a gray sameness. Even the jocks come out silent, as if the usual swagger has been washed off them.

Against the loud machinery of betting and competition, the rain creates a temporary hush. It’s as though the world is being held in suspension before the next round of noise.

Small wrens and small men

Bukowski slips in a quick image that quietly sets the scale of the whole poem: the wind twirling out / small wrens from the upper grandstand roof. The wrens feel incidental, almost accidental, yet they’re described with a kind of care; they’re light bodies spun into motion by weather. A little later, the horses pass with their little men on top. That echo of smallness links jockeys to birds, and it subtly reduces human importance in a place where humans like to imagine they’re in control.

The speaker, too, is physically minimized: he is under the grandstand, not in the shining center. The poem keeps lowering us into the underside of the scene, where what stands out are not the big announcements but the small, vulnerable forms moving through wind and rain.

Peace before the drunken war

The clearest tension in the poem is the contrast between what the horses are and what people turn them into. Before the race, they are at peace with / each other. Then comes the brutal, bitter phrase before the drunken war. It’s hard not to hear the crowd, the betting, the shouting, the money, and the general human desperation implied in that word drunken: not just intoxicated, but unsteady, reckless, willing to sacrifice sense and tenderness to appetite.

Set beside that, the speaker’s repeated settling for coffee reads differently. He is refusing, or failing, to enter the war fully. Yet he’s also implicated: he’s there, he’s choosing a horse, he’s watching. The poem holds that contradiction without resolving it: the speaker is both participant and witness, both hungry for the event and quietly repelled by what it does to the animals and to the people.

The procession turns into a funeral, then into flowers

The poem’s turn arrives with Then the horses walk by. Suddenly the scene stops being a set of trackside details and becomes a procession. The horses are taking their little men / away, and the movement is described as funeral and graceful / and glad. Those three words don’t naturally sit together, which is exactly the point: the walk to the race is both beautiful and ominous. It carries the dignity of ritual and the shadow of what’s coming.

The final comparison, like the opening / of flowers, is startling because it makes the moment feel tender rather than violent. Flowers open because they must; it’s instinctive, inevitable. The horses going out to run also feels inevitable, as if the entire mechanism of the track is as natural as blooming. But the earlier phrase drunken war keeps snagging that softness. The poem lets the image of flowers be true while also letting it be a kind of lie people tell themselves to make the spectacle bearable.

A harder question the poem won’t answer

If the speaker can see the horses at peace and can name the race a war, what does it mean that he still calls the procession glad? Is that gladness the horses’ beauty, the speaker’s relief at being alive in the rain, or the crowd’s appetite dressing itself up as celebration?