The First Time I Rode a Horse

Big hands taxied me up to the seat I took for a cradle on a back already bent and filled with rutted lines and bite scars, his hair was still brown but in spots, where the skin panicked for cover, age sprang up like the General’s venerable gray and He stood there laughing with the crows about how regal I looked with a toy whip in one hand but how I looked was unimportant as we moved my smell bled through and two aggressive rings flared and figured me out- a few more feet and I could feel the unsettling shift of unhappy weight beneath my reach. So I held fast to the great Van Dyke brush (its fibers and bristle magnetized from front to back) with a handle carved from thick muscle, that clung for life to the bones but He did not notice the flex in the gelding’s arcing neck, and He must have sneezed, or blinked, through the vital twitch that shook and dissolved into hyperbolic, bay curves: when it upset the Dauphin’s new throne with a weak kick, everyone was surprised.