The Mustang and The Appaloosa (for Joe Andoe)

And Said: Who are you, you beautiful spotted lady, I'm an Appaloosa Maiden waiting for the real thing to come along, another fellow from my royal line but not too close, the want healthy stock and I'm built to last. What's that leather necklace, are you engaged? Well, sort of. Who to? Well, that's where the sort of comes in. I don't know to whom. Who's whom? Never mind let's trot together a while, said the Appaloosa mare, I sort of like your style. The shaggy way you wear your hair. You've never known the curry bomb and never had those broken yellow teeth to dentist. And that scar! Got that in a fight with a palomino pal of mine. Bit like a bitch. You're very rough but you have a nice long roman nose. They say I come from somewhere in Arabia, Called Spain. Oh I come form a long historical situation too. One of my ancestors was from Russia! And they went on sweetly bragging but not very for very long. They followed the trail, which luckily went wrong and ended on a dark mesa where the quiet traces of the moon were blue and they became a pair among the falling needles of the ponderosa pine rolling and whinnying. You are indeed all horse, aren't you? I think I will take you home to meet the folks and you can stay a while, we'll get you to a doctor, call in the dentist, and the barber those hairs off you face. You won't have to go scraping around for grass in between the rocks and under the rocks I know about the snakes. You'll have to have your hay baled up and dished out for you by the forkful and you'll eat an apple out of the glad handoff the leader of the land or a carrot! And good clean water, oh I'm getting hungry and thirsty, it has been a special day. I'm hungry and thirsty but -- that pretty necklace around your throat, doesn't mean you're engaged? Hell no, as you would say, that's a bridal so my owner can ride me and guide me over the hills to watch the sunset. So he like pulls you by that leather necklace and takes you where you want to go? Where he wants to go. Do you like the sunset? I see the sun set every day and it always comes back up, kind of boring but ok. Listen, I'm gonna take my shaggy ass back to my herd an choke on the dust and munch the brush and you go back to the ranch you came from. It's more of a manse from which I came. I wish you'd come with me, you need care. You care a dappled beauty if ever I saw one, but you gotta go and I gotta go back on the other side of the mesa track. And she went and he went. And months later when she was licking the foal in the cool of the evening she looked toward the dusty end of the mesa and the quiet traces of the moon were blue.

Arnold Weinstein. 1999

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