Wild Horses

It's been a bitch of a day and a hassly weekend:

deadlines, meaningless meetings, a lost cell phone.

But we've not given up, we're out here just as planned

driving the east shore of Washoe Lake between Carson City and Reno

looking for the mustangs that have been materializing lately.

Today, though, no horses on the penitent hills grudging April grass

nor in the over-wintered ochre clumps hemming bird-flushed lake

nor drinking among shore cottonwoods, root-soaked in snowmelt

nor hanging around New Washoe City, scraggly little town

abrading Little Washoe Lake where

giving up the search, we've come to seek a picnic spot

eyes shaded from slanting light, peering through reeds

for ducks but finding only coots piping everywhere

a pair of cormorants vanishing overhead

meadowlarks twittering in old grass.

In the muddy ground beside the lake, telltale hoof prints

but it would be obvious to a blind man that horses have been here:

that fine barnyard fragrance. Too bad they're gone.

Thunderheads in turquoise erupt from Silver Peak down south,

dwarf Jobs Peak frosted white.

And then the high grass yards away rustles and divides

and then again, and then appears, emerging from the hills

palette of black and tan and sorrel, twenty-three in all

descending onto lake bed moist to keep

an appointment none of us will admit we had.

The mares wander out to us, cropping new grass,

occasionally looking up. With them are three spindly-legged foals

plus an older foal shaggy brown, the newborns hiding

behind their mothers, now and then peeking out

for portraits clicked off at staccato pace—

never grazing, only standing at attention held by sky

insects breezes birds car specks or even ourselves:

two living stones in an indolent stream of horses

eddying around us while we try to keep silent, fail—they don't care—

almost as if they like us, but actually with

the indifference of water, impassivity of dream.

Now, though, two mares, buckskin and skinny bay,

walk up close as you please. What can this be but friendship?

The sad-eyed bay is almost nuzzling us. Has she been human-fed?

In the excitement, we've forgotten the apples in our packs.

And so the little bay moves off, politely leaving us

to watch the others: pot-bellied pregnant mare

foal trying to nurse. One horse rolls in water, another in mud

kicking in delight at cloud-diffracted beams over tinsel lake.

Three more stand in the shallows, nibbling as they drink.

In the quiet light, a cattle egret follows the drinkers

seeking stirred-up insects. Two scruffy young stallions play fight.

The older foal struts about self-importantly—he's a prodigy.

As the others go over the hill he hangs back to look at us

storing up knowledge of humankind for the day he leads the herd.

Horse-forsaken, we walk on toward a willow-lined slough

to eat beside the coots. Yellow-headed blackbirds spout

tea-pot calls. An egret flushes, more cormorants fly over.

At sunset, forty ibis circle, returning twice more.

Two long-necked grebes glide by, and then a muskrat.

Sunless abandoned alien land before the roundups, before

the prehistoric horse hunts. Pre- or post-human

chaste desolation exhausted but for

crinkly crawl of creatures, seen, unseen,

deceitfully upsprouting into occasional Edens

to blur, obscure, laugh at the photographs

by naturalist eye that now observes descending from the hills

into the shadowless land another gang:

five outlaw stallions self-exiled from the herd

and how intriguing this improbable cabal.

The black leader advances, sniffs our air,

withdraws. A melancholy chestnut drifts away

in rumination till the action starts.

A ruddy yearling tries half-heartedly

to hang out with the two most macho studs

both chocolate brown—they could be brothers—

who start their showing off as we approach:

head-bumping, nipping, feinting, lunging,

rearing, whirling, chasing each other so that

they almost run us down. "Hey! Cut that out!"

They back off and continue with their horseplay,

the slimmer brother initiating each tussle

biting his older playmate behind the ear

and then both turn to face us in a pose:

"Don't you love us? You did come to see horses, didn't you?"

Back to their horsing around: nip, lunge, repeat.

The leader regards the show ironically from a distance.

At last the squad forms up again, bolts off into darkness

racing around the lake to join the others

and torment them with esprit.

"It was like a dream. Those stallions were so beautiful and silly.

And that bay mare seemed like she wanted to be ours . . .

What if she really did want to be ours? It just about makes me cry."

But are these honest horses? What do the photos say?

Let's try to probe the secrets in their eyes.

Not possible? Really? Don't you see, if it's not

then horse or human, one or the other, must be a machine.

Otherwise, the universal sympathy of living creatures

that these mendacious horses would persuade us still is possible.

"Horses are human," one of my boyhood teachers used to say

some easier to figure out than others. The stallions?

Ingenuous for sure. No motive but to win our admiration.

Human enough. But the mare? Unlike the free and open

expression of the stallions, her gaze is veiled.

What's she holding back? Has she known

affection manifest in sticky fingers, been bereaved—

but searches on, expecting only ache of disappointment

forgetting her first bereavement eons ago

when she and we were dragged out of our dream

and the path split and we parted, perhaps forever?

Appeared in The Weekly Avocet (3/24/19)

Photos: Doug Barrett