Other People's Horses

Other People's Horses
Featuring F. J. Bergmann

Horses are more like us than they initially appear. 

I distrust them enormously. 

If left alone they become bone-idle, indifferent, and lame. 
They forget how to horse.

Just as in isolation, we forget how to human.

We do for the horse what they cannot for themselves. 

 The brushing, the ride, the kata of leaping and stillness through words spoken and unspoken. 

Sometimes they need to be reminded of the words. 

Sometimes they pretend to have forgotten.

Sometimes they have.

We remind them. 

We are their burden to carry. As they are ours. 

When they shed weight or catch colic or lame, we rectify it through the ancient ways. And new ones. 

There is gelatinous linseed oil; there is hammer, and forge, and endless oiled leather. 

There are a lot of faeces.

And we venture forth to converse in the way horses know best.

The warmup is slow; circuits in the paddock

We must canter before we can run

A dance with a partner the size of a Volkswagen

With steel toes. 

Horses enjoy open spaces. There's fewer farmers now, and much larger tractors, but mint and alfalfa smell the same. 

Or perhaps they don't. I'm not a horse. 

It requires keen powers of observation to work with horses. Or observe this tiny toad in twilight.

I lack the powers of observation to avoid raw manure. 

When the light departs, I must cease. 

But the horses do not stop.

The work never stops.

They are our burden, as we are theirs.

 As long as the sun walks the sky. 

F. J. Bergmann is an editor, poet, writer, illustrator, equine wizard, and guardian of other people's horses living in Madison, Wisconsin. Lessons available by request. 

The author and photographer still finds horses really weird despite having grown up in dairy country.

He is substantially more comfortable with cows.