When a hausfrau in mid-life crisis sells everything
Except her donkey and three mules
And drives all the way from Florida with them
There’s nothing you can do. That’s a lot of borax
Shit and hay for miracle mules to move. So Uhaul,
Who fancies himself dispenser of miracles,
Did a lot of high-level horse trading, and built
A luxury suite, stall number one, for Brio,
To present him to the equine society
Instead of standing sentry down the hill
Like Cassandra by the river.
One would think he would want to get away
From a horse who continually bites him,
About whom he always eye-complains
In the most glowering of terms,
But it seems he misses Navajo
Who for his part seems disconsolate
Standing in the shavings underneath his
Flyguard mask, and charges, again, at the fence.
The mules keep their distance
Like the Appaloosa has the African Horse Sickness.
The view of this from his new manse
Seems to have afflicted Brio with a sudden loss
Of identity. Three abominations of nature
And a junior Pinocchio who appears to be in charge
Are WAY too relaxed after they safe cracked
His former enclosure. “Yeah, dude, scare them away,”
He seems to say, to egg poor Navajo on,
Horrified such monsters could replace him
On God’s acre. These upstart homesteaders
Seem too grateful besides, they promise no trouble
But everyone knows that they lie.
Already, though, I see him settling. It’s amazing
How quickly new worlds turn into
The only one that has ever been, after a few
Keen eyeings of the landscape for threats.
Still, there’s the matter of how doors open and close
At the same moment, the past that would scream
Its relevancy dumped unceremoniously
In a horse apocalypse, where a patina of buyer’s remorse
Forms in the dust. He wants to pretend both worlds
In collision are his, as he goes dizzy between them,
Feels neither are home.
At the same time, Navajo tried to eat him.
Forgiving and forgetting go so nose to nose it seems
It’s hard to pull them apart sometimes. That’s the way
Of divine will. It tells everyone (even mules) what to do,
Controls the only feedbag and its inexhaustible supply of love.
He can see the horses above and below, can’t help but notice
He’s slipped somehow into the community, having acquired
Enough tolerance from his stretch at the edge of the woods.
The other horses in turn have learned to let him speak,
Because he knows, they see, more than they can,
And being who he is is all that counts, to anyone.
