To be Held by a Horse
You of the global eyes
mounted sideways
on your long, sturdy face.
How is it that I may stare
longingly at you, my straight-ahead
predator eyes fixed
on your round haunches, sleek
neck, and wind-tossed mane
without even a flinch or flicker
from your flanks? You trust
my human more than I
trust myself, more open
than I could be in the face
of such threat.
Somehow, I think, it’s not my arms
squeezing you close like some forgotten toy,
nor my worshipful gaze into your long-lashed,
beauty queen eyes. I doubt you much care
for my human touch, or perhaps you do seek
that rhythm, the drawn-out, tender strokes,
the searching that reveals
how you, too, have been moved
by a strange and persistent hand.
Darling pony face, in all our glide, rock, and whisper,
in the stretch of my hips over yours,
in the muscular rise and fall of your back
between my open thighs
burns an image of utter suspension:
you are, indeed, a vessel
into which I am, through you,
being poured.
- Mary Ann Cain
Mary Ann Cain’s fiction, nonfiction essays, and poems have appeared in national and international literary and scholarly journals. Her five books are similarly diverse in genre, including a poetry collection, How Small the Sky Really Dreams (Dos Madres Press, 2021), a biography, South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs (Northwestern University Press, 2018), a novel, Down from Moonshine (Thirteenth Moon Press, 2009), and two scholarly books, Composing Public Space: Teaching Writing in the Face of Private Interests (Heinemann 2010) and Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing (SUNY Press 1995). She is Professor Emerita of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne and lives with her husband, poet George Kalamaras, and their beloved beagle, Blaisie, in Livermore, Colorado.