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Detail of the Four Chambers to the Horse’s Heart


ISSUE:  Winter 2007

 
 1

Listen. The last time I saw my father
alive, he spoke of horses, the brute geometry
of a broken team in motion. He tallied
the bushels of oats, gallons of water
down to the drop each task would cost.
How Belgians loved hardwood hames the most.
Give them the timber sled at Logging Camp
any day, the workable meadows in need
of leveling, tilling, harrowing, new seeding.
We could’ve been in our dark loafing shed,
cooling off between loads of chopping hay,
the way he carried on that last good day.
With the proper encouragement, he said,
they would work themselves to death.

2

Drifts of snow up to their hocks and knees,
the team struggles. They want nothing more
than to droop in the breath-warm barn,
to fill both cheeks with the chopped timothy
of August afternoons, to muzzle trough water,
then rest. Nothing more now than to rest.
Snowflakes alighting on their hot withers
vanish. The sledge so laden with slush and ice.
They snort, toss, stamp and fart to keep blood
thrumming through their bodies, heavenly
machinery in sync with work and weather.
Because the driver, my father, chirps and barks
in a barely human way, they labor.
The work will stop when he says so.

3

Breaker of Mustangs and Broncos, saint
to all things unbridled, you knew cancer
(like the roots dismantling your culvert)
would have you drawn and quartered.
The stallions whipped to sunder limb
from perishable limb. Divided, the evil
in the body loses its power. The fallen
horse, for example, you saw trampled
had disappeared overnight, scattered
across acres by coyotes or not as dead
as you thought. His harem of mares
soon another’s. You were often called
a man even then. Startled in every direction,
those horses almost touched the ground.

4

So much can spook a horse when the world
comes alive: an unlatched gate the wind
knocks, a pine knot popping like a shotgun
in the campfire. If blinders fail to block
all fresh deadfall along his usual trail,
he’ll snap the trace. Now loop a rope
around his upper lip to put a “twitch” on.
This, somehow, settles him down more
than the creak of doubletrees, the routine
caress of your currycomb, the molasses
that glues oats in hunks of giddy bliss.
Given sweets, any horse will follow you.
Whisper what you want to this one.
Never question that disquieted heart.

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