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Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, on February 27, 1951. He had little interest in poetry in his youth. In 1971, he was drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Vietnam War, and filed as a

Kissing a Horse

by Robert Wrigley (b. 1951)

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 Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings 
 we owned that year, it was Red— 
 skittish and prone to explode 
 even at fourteen years—who'd let me 
 hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine 
 caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain 
 up the head to the eyes. He'd let me stroke 
 his coarse chin whiskers and take 
 his soft meaty underlip 

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