Buddha’s white stallion …
loaded pack horses with blond manes …
the haunchy gold draft horse lowers down …

but also for their service to us. Over and over again, Tricia writes of how we have benefited from them, how great their service to us has been from the gentle horse she rode as a young girl learning to ride:

Horse mad, I kick my cowgirl boots
On horse that would not trot
A nameless paint I loved

to Jack,

the retired cowpony, with gray age-spots
and the sharp backbone ridge of a smart horse
who had sorted cows, rode fences, twisted around barrels

and for their ultimate sacrifice in a war

One million dead in the Civil War
If you count the mules
Which I do

Tricia’s reverence and gratitude are revealed in the next lines

Black or white, male
or female. Their integrity
is without question

They did the work
they were asked to
without a nod at glory.

In five three-line stanzas with an economy of well-chosen words, she gives a moving tribute to animals we have taken for granted. After reading this poem, the reader realizes just how apt is the title Let’s Hear it for the Horses. My favorite lines of this poem:

I say let’s blowtorch the rebel statue
Men off their mounts and keep
The horses striding on their pedestals.

The horses deserve the pedestal; they gave without asking, without taking sides.

Beyond their service and sacrifice, Tricia portrays them as creatures worthy love and admiration.

My hand up to the mare’s nose,

She blows back warmth.
I pick crud from mudded hooves
That once split thunder
I comb her winter coat.

Never having rode her bareback
Doesn’t matter now,
When she sniffs my palm
Her whiskers tickle.

Her love shines through with such well-chosen specific detail:

crud from mudded hooves; her whiskers tickle.

Tricia also gives homage to the mare’s past magnificence in the metaphor that contrasts so beautifully the mudded hooves with the hooves that once split thunder.

Tricia knows her way around language. Listen to the rhythm and sounds in this line:

Humble draft horses clopping over the cobblestones

Or notice how she creates images that rocket to your perception:

A gallop up
The haggard slice of ice moon

Feeling our feet
Stampeding feet
On nimbus turf

This is the way Tricia would like to die, on one of her favorite horses rising up, rising up, her braid and the mare’s tail flying behind them. Yes, the moon is old and unlovely but they ride on a luminous cloud of their own making.

I particularly enjoyed how she used horses as an avenue to make meaning in her life and in our lives. Again, I cite from Jack

The wrangler said not to mind Jack’s battle scars,
The hairless spot mid-back, that gray-black scab

Where a saddle scored his spine
Jack is a good boy, she said, full of spunk.

His head down serenity under my touch
The gas passed, a lean to my brush.

He was all cowponies, now he is not one
But with me also one.

Isn’t this a way for all of us to age? To know we have done our jobs well and to relax into retirement and let ourselves be loved?