west

You could say I rode a tall horse.
You could say I rode a long black horse.
In reality I'd never even touched a horse.
I drove by them all the time.
Horses loose in pastures;
horses tied to fences, to trees;
horses hobbled;
horses running wild along the ditches;
and then the ones that simply stood in the rain,
that baked in the sun,
that dreamt with their heads down.
As I shot past in my car it was all I could manage
to even glance at a horse.
However, I do remember noticing
this one horse, a grey horse;
he was young and was kept apart from other horses.
He was always pacing and stomping
and throwing his head and whinnying,
and basically always on the brink
of exploding chest-first through the fence
to get over to the other horses.
For horses are herd animals.
Horses need other horses.
Horses easily die of loneliness.
This young grey horse seemed to be doing this.
He was a colt when I first saw him,
and about thirty-two when I finally pulled over and parked my car.
I left the engine running and got out
and strode through the tall grass
to get to the barbed-wire fence where he stood.
He was quite old, sway-backed, bad teeth.
His eyes were sunk in his head. He no longer
moved about, but just stood there in place
and sort of bobbed his head
in a kind of left-to-right figure eight.
It was all he was capable of--I could see this
as I approached him in his pasture.
All the other horses were in a distant pasture.
They looked like specks of black rice
on the yellow hillside. I reached the fence.
I was finally standing not three feet from this horse.
I reached over the top strand of wire.
As I lowered my hand
the horse looked at me serenely
as if he'd known me all his life.
I patted his head.
I am one of the world's largest assholes.

--Autobiography, by Michael Earl Craig