The Death of Hugh
by Stephen Cribari

The difficult part about the death of Hugh

Was Hanley, a chestnut gelding, sixteen hands,
Middle-age, white blaze down his face.
Hanley barely tolerates anyone
Who is not female, or who chooses to ride
In an English saddle, or who stands between him and food.
A girl once pulling his tack left his stall
Open while other horses were out being fed.
Her finger bore the brunt of this oversight
As Hanley bolted through the opening
And scraped against the saddle which hit the door
Slicing her finger against the metal frame,
Slicing her finger almost to the bone.
Blood and trauma everywhere and Hanley
Out with the herd tearing at mouthfuls of grass.
But Hugh we considered the favorite of the barn:
Grey, Arabian, and highly trained
With little patience for Hanley or anyone
Who failed to show the deference and respect
Due his dressage brain and sophisticated strength.
We were teaching each other a lot, were Hugh and I:
How well a horse could move if he wanted to,
How healthy a horse could feel when ridden well
And the difficult part about the death of Hugh
Was not, of course, the death of Hugh - for death
Was as much a part of Hugh as a part of me
And we each had lived long enough to find
Death interweaving more and more with life.

I found Hugh in the paddock the morning he died
And not long dead, a couple of hours perhaps
And lying on his side as if asleep
His body still warm in the January wind.
But he was dead. I could tell it from his smile
Smiling not at death as he often did
But of death, a smile not of his own making.
There was little blood, nothing of note except
A small thin scratch, no more than a surface scratch
Not a finger’s length along a cannon bone,
And a little ring of blood around a hole
Above his nose that one of the crows had pecked.
The herd was at the hay bales some distance away
And no more concerned about the death of Hugh
Than Hanley was about me or anyone
Yet there was Hanley standing over Hugh
Who had been everything he loathed: dressage,
Not female, and always in the way of food.
He muzzled the lifeless hulk, the smell of Hugh
Still stronger than the smell of death, the taste
Of Hugh still sweet to the caressing tongue.
There had been a connection between Hanley and Hugh
That none of us had seen or understood.
I made for the barn. The wind rushed over the plains.

The difficult part about the death of Hugh
Was the mass of Hugh immobile on the ground
And Hanley slowly lifting up his head
Then picking his way across the frozen mud
Closing the distance between us, and standing there
Pressing the white blaze that snaked along his face
Into my chest. He’d found a use for me.
Horses see hyper-sensitive to light.
Their lives are lived in black and white. They sense
The slightest movement even in the dark
And it means something whenever something moves;
It means something when the landscape’s not consistent,
Or when things don’t move as they’re supposed to move.
And I had understood how Hugh could move
And I could see, here, where he did not move
As he should have. As he always had.
Here: where Hanley was at that moment blind.

And at that moment, I was not between Hanley and food.