Kissing a Horse

By Robert Wrigley b. 1951 Robert Wrigley

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 coarse 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.

Reprinted from Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems, published in 2006 by Penguin. Copyright © Robert Wrigley, 2006, and reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 2006)

Biography

Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois. He was drafted in 1971, but was discharged as a conscientious objector. The first in his family to graduate from college, and the first male for generations to escape work in a coal mine, Wrigley earned his MFA from the University of Montana, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees, John Haines, and Richard Hugo.

Wrigley believes that poetry can influence the world and . . .

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