To find one photo from when I was ten, 
starting with the suitcase for legal briefs
full of my daughter’s baby pictures, the booklets
she wrote in fourth and fifth grade, my great grandmother’s
photos on my mother’s side that had no names written
on the back just generic Lewis.  
 
Then I dug out the leather bag bursting with photos,
diplomas, meaningless certificates, holiday
images spent with a man I’m severed from,
snapshots of gardens I encouraged over ten years. 
The pictures of my first husband looking so handsome
fifty years ago I held them in my hand. 
 
I found the photo of me riding the paint in the wood box
my mother used as a lap desk, the container I consider
most important, the box I grab on the way
out the door when the earthquake hits. There I am, 
proud as all get out of the yellow ribbon pinned to my chest
probably for sitting a trot well enough to come in third. 
Or it might have been for barrel racing. I’m not sure.
                        

It wasn’t Lucky
or my friend’s thirty-two-year-old mare,
part Tennessee Walker, part Arab
who made me write this
 
or Darcy, the paint in the rodeo photo
or Secretariat, or Daisy who won
the quarter-mile race 
 
but gratitude for sharing
a universe with creatures
that inspired the Greeks,
Chinese, Hindi, followers 
of Mohammed, Koreans, 
Tibetans, Mongolians, 
Assyrians and the Valkyries
to name the wind drinkers,
spirit horses, and ghost horses –
 
and visions of horses with wings,
hope
that we may rise above limits
with friends
so different from us
that we learn to love.