WEBVTT

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A poem about marriage
I guess, or horses.

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I started to write the poem
because my grandfather had

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two work horses,
plow horses that were

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almost members of the family.

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And the dominant member
of the pair was Nell

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and the other member of the pair
was Charlie, an old gelding.

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They lived to be 30--

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Charlie lived to be 31
years old and he died.

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And then actually Nell
grieved herself to death.

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She wouldn't eat after he died.

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And my grandfather
buried her in the pasture

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and she just hung around the
place where he was buried.

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But it seemed to
me that in a way,

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that they were a model for my
own marriage with kind of--

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I keep asking my kids, I said,
who's the boss in this family?

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And they always say, Gloria.

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And I can't help that.

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That's not the way my
father taught me to do it.

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And even though she was
smarter than my father,

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I don't know how it worked
out, but it doesn't seem to me

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that being a member of a pair is
always an altogether good thing.

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There's something incredibly
sad about being in a team

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like Charlie and Nell
or Rodney and Gloria.

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Not until my father had
led her into the paddock

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and driven her a
month in circles

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and made her walk six weeks
with a collar on her neck

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and the bag of seeds on her back
did he snap the leather traces

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to the hamess.

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For she was not
green halter-broke

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when he took her that
way, rearing and shying

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at each birdcall of shadow.

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It would be another
year in blinders

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before she began seeing how
it would go from then on,

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moving not as herself
alone but as one of a pair,

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with the sorrel gelding of
the same general conformation

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and breed shuffling beside
her, and between them

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only the split
tongue of the wagon.

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As is often the
case with couples,

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he the subdued,
philosophical one,

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and she with the great spirit
and the preternatural knack

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of opening gates.

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They had barely become a team
when the beasts began vanishing

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from the fields, and
the fields, one by one,

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fell before the
contagion of houses.

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Still, they were
there for a long time

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after the first tractors
and the testing of rockets,

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so you could see how it
had been that way for years

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with them, just the one
motion again and again.

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Until at dusk when the harnesses
were lifted, the odor that rose

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seemed history itself, and
they bent to their feed

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in the light that would be that
way for the rest of their lives.

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