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 course 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