Me, Explaining to My Dog
These goddamned horses in our backyard are so wild:
You know what I mean?
Ya, wild—
First off, you know nearly all wild horses are dead?
The rest, colts of domesticity running free, just
kinda wild.
Stop barking, come on now.
They’re lazily munching grass…
you wanna beer?
Ha. I’m kidding, dog—
but I’m gonna fetch another.
We’ll sit here on the porch
and chew on our special bones…
watch the horses,
watch the grass,
watch the sun
fall behind the horses
‘til there’s two for every one—
the tension in the sky
(the kind that squeezed a bark out of you)
is the stretching of their black outlines across the dirt.
Look, boy, we look like cowboys:
this kind of iron light magnifies every angle—
shadows of chins, bones, brims, bottles
and horses, I’m trying to say, show us both sides exist.
You see ‘um, boy?
Huh?
--------------
I haven’t puked in thirteen years—
(you threw-up this morning)
no reason why.
You know horses can’t throw-up either?—
simply not a feature god equipped ‘um with.
Imagine a horse with god.
Nah,
you can’t, prob’ly, they’re all sinners—
I doubt any horse went to heaven.
Ok, don’t lose me here, but they’d never make the cut—
they get so bored they
pick up, like I have, a set of stable vices
Good ones.
They get so bored they suck on air,
dry.
Sometimes until their teeth fall out.
Yeah, yeah,
I know horses are strong and graceful.
We measure the world with their power.
They’re the subject all kinds of memorabilia—
been in every war.
I think they’re ugly, though, but damn,
do they have pretty hair.
Is that why little girls love ‘um?
Castles. Knights. Princesses.
And running flowing horses.
Not the scene I saw then I was a kid.
No, sir.
You won’t stop
your tail wagging. It’s making me cringe a
little and laugh—
not at you, no. It’s that sound…
thud...thud...thud...thud...thud…
that woke me when I was twelve
on the ranch. A twelve-hundred pound horse
rehearsing onanism,
a drummer
playing rudiments, flams drummed across his belly
thud...thud...thud...thud...thud…
God, that’s a neat feature, and
those biggest eyes on walking feet
staring blindly through three-hundred and fifty
degrees of space!
In the middle of the night!
Extremely wild stuff.
Dog, look: you are good when you are bad; good when you are good.
I just don’t see the difference.
Like how we are cowboys every evening and
revel in creation before us.
Horses of relentless dysfunction.
God’s best jokes.
Acts of rock n’ roll.
Just like us.