My Wife Is A Horse

By P. V. LeForge

Poems about farms and horses and dressage. This is a special edition featuring two extra poems, one of which is "My Husband's an Ass," written by Sara Warner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Bay Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301438310

P. V. LeForge

P. V. LeForge lives on a horse farm in north Florida with his wife Sara Warner, who is a dressage rider and trainer. Their stable includes Fabayoso, who was Southeastern Regional Stallion Champion, and his colt Freester, who was Reserve Champion USDF Horse of the Year in 2011.LeForge is also an e-book formatter who can be found on Mark's List. He enjoys formatting Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama.LeForge's other books of poetry and fiction can be obtained in ebook and paperback at most on-line book outlets. In addition to writing and doing farm chores, he enjoys songwriting and target archery.

Book preview

The night our colt was born

my wife lay in a hammock

just outside the pasture

and gazed into the western sky.

It was cool and clear and the lights she saw

were Mars and Venus

in close conjunction with the moon.

She had planned everything carefully;

chosen the best stallion for our mare,

|provided the best feed and care.

And when she heard that first whinny

and caught sight of those first wobbly steps,

like those of a drunken cricket,

she knew that all the signs had been right.

I knew it too—

I could see the stars in her eyes.

Gloves

(for Don Caswell)

When I moved to the farm

I felt lost in the chaos of

unfamiliar chores:

pastures that needed mowing,

fences that needed mending,

stalls that needed mucking,

and after a week my hands

were fields of scratches and blisters.

Like a true country boy

I began shopping at truck stops

for diesel, lunch, and flannel shirts,

or just browsing among the doodads

I might someday have to use.

One day, in a bin near the register,

I saw them: piles of leather gloves,

three for $2.99. I bought them all.

Back home, I cleaned off a shelf in the tool room,

discarding coffee cans full of mismatched screws,

stiff paintbrushes, yards of rusty chain,

and years of insects caught up

in cobwebs as old as my truck.

And there they were: 44 pairs of gloves,

stacked neatly like coins

on the newly dusted shelf.

As the weeks went by

I used the gloves for every task imaginable.

They protected my hands from baling twine,

blackberry brambles, and the friction of

shovels, rakes, and pitchforks.

I kept one pair on the tractor, one in the house,

another in the back of my truck.

They kept my hands clean on muddy days.

I don’t remember when it began,

but the once-gleaming pile of cloth

and leather began getting smaller.

The dogs had gotten to the ones on the tractor,

another pair had been hardened in cement,

a third came apart in the wash.

Others had embedded thorns that stung

my hands like a swarm of ground bees.

I have bought other things for the farm:

lumber, a tail blade, new tools of all kinds,

but somehow I feel attached to these gloves,

as if they provide some kind of barrier

between my old life in the city

and this new, rustic retreat.

It may sound absurd, but I suspect

I will last only as long as the gloves

that remain stacked on my shelf.

When I first realized this, I began

treating them more carefully,

using them on only the hardest, dirtiest tasks.

I sewed them together when they tore.

I still visit truck stops as often as I can,

but they have never replaced the gloves

I cleaned them out of so long ago,

and recently, with only a handful left,

I stopped wearing gloves altogether.

These days, calluses have formed on my hands

like boles on the limbs of pines

and I am losing my sense of touch.

I find that I can now reach into fire

and redistribute kindling.

I can hammer my thumbs without pain

and even dig out large tree roots with my fingers.

My neighbors have noticed this, and lately

they have been using me to do most of their chores.

They all say that they have run out of gloves.

Pulling the Ditches

After heavy rains the ditches on both sides of dirt roads

run freely with water and with the red clay that used to

make up the surface of what is now a pretty bumpy track.

Right after graduate school I used to run the kind

of bulldozer that has