Kissing a Horse by Robert Wrigley (2006)
Many thanks to my Aunt Jen, who read this poem at Thanksgiving dinner in 2006.
As a child, I worked at a stable, along with my sister Sara and our friend Donna, in exchange for riding lessons and a discount on boarding fees for Sara’s and my pony. Entire days of summer would pass with curry combs, saddle oil, hoof picks, oats, and muckrakes. In between working, the three of us lived out a startling range of adventure, from jumping off the loft into the manure pile because we were gross, to seeing a veterinarian shoulder-deep in a horse’s butt, which was also gross.
One of the scariest adventures occurred the day we took three horses out, borrowing Buddy from the next door stable. At the local park, Buddy bolted. We screamed, and I mean screamed, as we watched Donna’s new saddle slide to the underside of his belly—we’d loosened the girth strap when we (apparently poorly) tied him to a tree—then break into pieces as he somehow managed to kick it off. Unburdened, he galloped down a street that had its fair share of traffic. All of us were sobbing, imagining the horrors that could befall a loose horse running down suburban streets, as we scrambled onto the two remaining horses and raced back to the stable.
Buddy had made it home safely, and he was never loaned to us again.
Most mornings I would wander the stalls and corrals to greet each of the 30 or so boarders. Easter, the strawberry roan mare, was an elderly, wise layabout. Love Potion #9 was the regal gray stallion, whom I was never allowed to handle. CJ was Sara’s saucy bay gelding. Magic was my plodding, sweet appaloosa mare, who one day randomly felt her oats and took off, out of character, with me inadvertently urging her to go faster as I dug my panicking legs and heels tighter into her sides. Soxxie was Donna’s bay filly, a bratty teenager of a horse who we were supposed to be training. Dancer, our frizzy-maned pony, was stubborn and lazy and adorable.
Days at the stable would leave me starving, sore, and dirty. Horse sweat mingled with my own and stiffened my jeans. Their hairs worked their way into the fabric of my clothes, and I’d be gilded in dust, and one day, blood. (Don’t use English stirrups on western saddles because if an English stirrup falls on your head while you remove the saddle, you will need stitches.) Even after years of riding, some days my leg muscles would seize up and I’d walk the mile home like a withered, bow-legged character from the Old West.
How lucky was I to spend so many days of my childhood with horses? They possess such a compelling combination of wisdom and innocence, a hard-to-describe characterization that feels synonymous with who I was at the time. I soared over fences, feeling the strong muscles of a horse rippling beneath the bareback pad, knowing it was only by the grace of this animal that I could be lifted so high. I picked up hind legs that were connected to massive, powerful quarters, and scraped dirt from hooves that could kill me with one kick. I pressed my face against necks and withers, entwined my fingers in mane, flew through the trails with the sturdy sound of horseshoe on dirt keeping time. Our horses served as conduits of connection for us three: to each other, to the adults who guided us through potential disasters, to themselves, these animals who are so distinct from us yet pulse with such a similar spirit.
There is simply nothing like a horse.
Also, one time I was supposed to be feeding the horses, but I got distracted by the goats. Through the stable breezeway, I heard the owner’s voice: “Is Rachel done feeding the horses?” And another kid who worked there, let’s call him Snitch, said, “No, she’s just been talking to the goats all day.” He said it in a super-duper mean way, like it was somehow unreasonable to spend time talking to goats.
Short Stuff:
- Wrigley was the first person in his family to graduate from college, and he went on to become a college professor. He retired in 2016 from the University of Idaho.
- He writes mostly about where we humans belong in the natural world.
Topics
horses; benevolence
Kissing a Horse
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.
—Robert Wrigley
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