Beware too much happiness!
The horses paused suspiciously before the open door,
snorting and stamping, while sunlight poured
onto the cold cement. They smelled snow
in the barn’s shadow, mud along the south wall,
matted grass in the thawing pasture.
Their nostrils flared and their ears
lay back, then pricked forward, far forward,
and they stretched their elegant necks
as if the world were offering them a slice of sweet apple
or something even more pure, on an open palm.

I was just a girl and couldn’t understand
how they could hesitate at the edge of something
so intoxicating. Spring’s first bee flew blindly
in then out again, all impulse, no plan.
At last with a clattering of hooves
they left the barn for the bright paddock.

Even then they huddled together in their dull, thick coats,
superstitious, imagining a wrathful master
who would whip them for taking what is offered,
a master capricious as March.
I swung the heavy door closed
and climbed the fence to watch them,
the bay, the black, the pale appaloosa, and the rest.
No one had ever broken my will, forced me
into the traces; I was too young for school.
They tested the earth with their sensitives hooves
and didn’t like it—to cold, too soft, too unpredictable.