I'm Adeli Moe and this is The Slowdown.

In Kentucky, horses are everywhere.

When folks come to visit, even the young kids grow weary of yelling out horses every time

we turn a corner on some pastoral vista just a minute out of the city.

I will never get used to them, those enormous animals swaying in the field.

I love them and sometimes they scare me.

They scare me because they are more than me, stronger, larger, more in tune with the grass

under their hooves.

Once were I used to walk every morning, there was a bunch of yearlings in an adjacent

field.

I'd say hello to them and they'd keep their distance until they'd slowly meander over

wearily.

It felt like we both needed it, the daily greeting, the head nods, the sun coming up, the

idea that maybe we do this again tomorrow, this thing called living.

In today's poll-setting poem, we see how the speaker needs to acknowledge an old horse

every day and how that need becomes doubled when trauma occurs.

We watch too, as the horse and the speaker become almost united in their need for escape.

Elegy for Kentucky by Joy Priest.

No where to drive, night upon night that last summer, but back, back to the cokey couple

I was crashing with in their 26 year habit.

On the way there, the same horse always dying at the curve before I turned like a kitschy

disco ball onto their street name I can't recall.

...