When I was a boy
I loved my country.  
                   -James Wright
 
And My Country Loved Me


The horses my god how
they could have crushed our feet and bit
our hands but only lipped
sugar from our palms
and gaped to show tremendous
tongues—and the cats too
how they walked rail fences
pausing to sit on posts
hunting mice in grass or snow—and sometimes
it seemed the horses regarded the cats
and the cats regarded the horses
as I regarded them:
beautiful in blizzards or rain or heavy
green sickening heat of July or cool
morning August fog, shadows
and hooves I could feel
through my mattress at night, eyes rolling
and steam rising from wet
backs solid as the smell of the tack
that touched them hanging
in a darkened room.
 
In boy dreams I’m their equal
still, their flesh mine— 
pregnant Black Kitty again leaps
from her box into my bed and scratches
my leg as she pushes out
the first of four kittens—or old Bob
with the broad back
who quiets as I climb on and walks me
to the pond where he twitches
flies and waits while I swim and fill
my stringer with bass, waits like a gray uncle
to take me home again.