I am weary of horses,
the wild not-wild mustangs
of imagined western ranges,
coarse sage fragrant with rain
and diesel fuel, tangled manes,
tails and foals, slick-flanked
stallions racing from sainted
cowboys riding down the sky,
noisy flaring hounds spiraling
dust demons above a confusion
of hooves, a mare jumps fence,
just like that, graceful and alive,
she stumbles and breaks her leg
and stands crooked with exhaustion,
she is calmed, prayed for, and
pistol shot dead, just like that,
I watch from above,
I am weary.
Wild not-wild, mythic blood
drains into dirt, darting
dragonflies pause and hover,
a stray colt, a spent mare,
fences and cages and idling trucks
moored in the sagebrush sea turned
to dust, a dead sea, as binoculared
humans panicked with devotion
watch from a ridge, murmuring
their distress, as cowboy
bedevilers spin sideways through
air dense with dust, as aloft, a small
cloud, a hard wind, a dust devil,
tall walking rain, I startle weary
horses into full gallop
—
Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet. His essays and poems appear in Sky Island Journal, High Country News, The AutoEthnographer, and elsewhere.
