I felt I was missing something. I didn’t understand why Walsh persevered with a horse as difficult as Bunny. He had other horses, after all. Walsh told me he didn’t know Bunny’s challenges when he bought her, but once he started working with her, he was determined to carry on. “I’m not gonna let this go,” he said.
But there was something else, too. Bunny is a special horse. “You should see her run,” Walsh said. “It’s like her feet aren’t even touching the ground. She is so elegant and free, and her mechanics are perfect. It is a sight to behold. I’ve written poems about her. Maybe I should show them to you.”
Three weeks later, a manila envelope full of handwritten poems arrived in my mailbox. Walsh doesn’t have a computer or internet connection at his home, so he couldn’t email me. “I’m gonna need those back when you’re done,” he told me on the phone. “I want to show them to my mother.” Some of the poems were in French, which he studied in grade school, and Spanish, which he learned during the year he spent drilling wells in Patagonia. “I dabble in both languages,” he said. “I try to keep it going.”
Among the pages, I found an ode to Bunny called “The Cowboy Exclaims.” And in it I found the heart of the connection between an aging cowboy and his troubled horse. After describing her gait as “an actual piece of the sky,” Walsh wrote:
N’ ever’ time I see it,
After I’m thru,
Bein’ choked to the point of tears,
I start to get Greedy
N’ I Hunger, for just a piece…
…Gawd, I need a piece of that,
to fill up my last few years.
I don’t need to possess it — contain it.
Don’t want to ever own it outright.
But dang.
If it could just be a piece.
coerce it
seduce it
be one with it
— embrace it
— with every bit of my might
Then maybe she would make me
somethin’
Somethin’
I’d completely like
Then maybe,
just maybe, I too,
(Cuza’ her; n’ with her)
Could be somethin’
Somethin’ that is …
…JUST RIGHT