Heartstrings : Weighing In

Monday, April 16, 2012

Weighing In

I started boarding Coro in September of 2011. While I've been riding for most of my life, studied equine science in college and even worked at two different barns, in many ways I was like a new horse owner - I'd never been solely responsible for their care and had a lot to learn. The two horses had never needed anything beyond hay, although they got to be on pasture for part of the summer and my mom gave them a little bit of bran mixed with oats as a treat. I will also guarantee that they were eating the best hay in the county. Between the move, the new hay, and getting older, the horses did not come through their first winter with me very well. Through research and some trial and error I started supplementing their feed regimen - Notchee (Coro's Arabian mare companion who was my mother's horse) actually had to be cut back last fall as she started to look like she was expecting a foal any day. Coro now gets seven pounds of Triple Crown Senior and one pound of Envision in addition to the grass hay provided by my barn. I was really pleased with how he was looking last year, and happy that even under the sometimes-deceiving winter coat layer he came through in great condition. On Friday I had the vet out for spring shots and dental (Coro did not have his teeth floated as his heart murmur makes him a compromised candidate for sedation and as long as he is not losing weight we are trying to be conservative). Dr. C put the weight tape on Coro and chuckled - he knew I had been working really hard to put weight on him. "You're not going to believe this," he said with a grin. By his estimation Coro has gained about eighty pounds in the past year! It's nice to know I'm doing something right.

So, although Coro would like visitors to the barn to believe otherwise and is always begging through his window, he is in fact getting enough to eat.

1 comment:

TerryApril 17, 2012 at 12:57 PM
I'd fall for that sweet begging look!
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Poetry Corner

Source
by Mark Doty

I'd been traveling all day, driving north
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses
startled awake by the new green around them—

when I saw three horses in a fenced field
by the narrow highway's edge: white horses,

two uniformly snowy, the other speckled
as though he'd been rolling in flakes of rust.
They were of graduated sizes—small, medium,

large—and two stood to watch while the smallest
waded up to his knees in a shallow pond,

tossing his head and taking
—it seemed unmistakable—
delight in the cool water

around his hooves and ankles.
I kept on driving, I went into town

to visit the bookstores and the coffee bar
and looked at the new novels
and the volumes of poetry, but all the time

it was horses I was thinking of,
and when I drove back to find them,

the three companions left off
whatever it was they were playing at
and came nearer the wire fence—

I'd pulled over onto the grassy shoulder
of the highway—to see what I'd brought them.

Experience is an intact fruit,
core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open,
entered, it can't be the same, can it?

Though that is the dream of the poem:
as if we could look out

through that moment's blushed skin.
They wandered toward the fence.
The tallest turned toward me;

I was moved by the verticality of her face,
elongated reach from the tips of her ears

down to white eyelids and lashes,
the pink articulation
of nostrils, wind stirring the strands

of her mane a little to frame the gaze
in which she fixed me. She was the bold one;

the others stood at a slight distance
while she held me in her attention.
Put your tongue to the green-flecked peel

of it, reader, and taste it
from the inside: would you believe me
if I said that beneath them a clear channel

ran from the three horses to the place
they'd come from, the cool womb

of nothing, cave at the heart
of the world, deep and resilient and firmly set
at the core of things? Not emptiness,

not negation, but a generous, cold nothing:
the breathing space out of which new shoots

are propelled to the grazing mouths,
out of which the horses themselves are tendered
into the new light. The poem wants the impossible;

the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals

come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk....

Cold, bracing nothing that mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root hair

and horsehair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself
into the afternoon. You too: you flare

and fall back into the necessary
open space. What could be better than that?

It was the beginning of May,
the black earth nearly steaming,
and a scatter of petals decked the mud

like pearls, everything warm with setting out,
and you could see beneath their hooves
the path they'd traveled up, the horse road

on which they trot into the world, eager for pleasure
and sunlight, and down which they descend,

in good time, into the source of spring.