The pictures here were taken of my horse Goldie on September 29, 2013. And because the weather had been so nice around then, I sat outside near him and
read the last book I finished reading, which was a book of poems about horses,
and from that book I selected two poems to include with the one I already chose
to enclose with Christmas cards later this year. At the moment, I don’t know
whether I’ll even get around to sending out cards, but the poems are included below: “Jack” by Maxine Kumin, “Kissing a Horse” by Robert Wrigley,
and “Hay for the Horses” by Gary Snyder (which made me smile – though not today,
and probably not anytime soon).
I rarely post on this blog (I have a second blog where I post my paintings at bjford3art.blogspot.com). But a year and a day after my last post on this blog (specifically, Friday, October 4, 2013, which was 4 days ago as I write this), Goldie, the horse I've had for more than twenty years, passed away. He was about thirty years old and had been needing help to get up for about 2 years, but it was becoming more
and more frequent: rather than happening once every couple of months it was
happening once every couple of weeks or so. And this last time he just didn't
have it in him to do it again.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Poem Number One of Three: "Jack" by Maxine Kumin:
How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets
where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses
the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years
and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:
suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us,
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,
a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his
hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.
That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following
fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table
my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone
did you remember that one good winter?
* * * * * * * * * * *
Poem Number Two of Three: "Kissing a Horse" by Robert Wrigley:
Of the two spoiled, barn-sour
geldings
we owned that year, it was
Red—
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years—who’d
let me
hold to my face his own: the
massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the
broad plain
up the head to the eyes. He’d
let me stroke
his coarse chin whiskers and
take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man’s
carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping
upper half of one, just
so that I could smell
the long way his breath had
come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the
heart,
from a world that meant no
harm.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Poem Number Three of Three: "Hay for the Horses" by Gary Snyder:
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
