for J.J. Dunham

The farrier drops the left hind hoof,
and the gelding snubbed to the gatepost
lets fly his right foreleg straight out

and cracks the kneecap of the man
who, in consideration of the old boy's case
of nerves, or ordinary orneriness,

had stood there all the while the final shoe
was nailed and trimmed, stroking
the long neck and peering into the enormous eye,

and who, though he knew better, had let his mind
wander and didn't see the ears lay back,
but who, by some sixth or seventh horse sense,

still felt the blow coming and somehow
without the least other bodily motion manages
to leap back almost all the way away—

a quarter inch, a millisecond, and he would not be
so absurdly hopping there among
the silvered old and new slick droppings,

uttering not the least curse nor horsely condemnation,
and in truth not even thinking of baseballs,
dog food, or hard-earned equine contumely,

since his wife in the nearby shade
of a great black walnut tree stands
stroking her distended pregnant belly,
and because it is, after all, her horse, born
the same day she was twenty-one years before,
the same day the child she carries might

—if what she hopes for comes to pass—
be born himself, a boy she intends if the dates align
to name after them both—Joseph alimp

now through the trodden grasses,
and Burley of the warning, protective nicker—
or no, maybe Jasper, name of the farrier

hand-stenciled and sun-bleached on his truck's door,
a name she suddenly admires
and which she will tell her husband about

later on, as they sit on the porch,
and she nestles the bag of ice over his knee,
and Burley stands at the pasture gate, neighing.