Unabashed Gratitude

Ross Gay and a visit to an old friend. Also a poem about horses, kind of.

A short one today, because my small dog Mimsy and I are driving to Longmont to visit Tully and Melissa and the baby. Also Charlie and the tall boys.

Tully is one of my first Friends From Online (FFOs), from I don’t know, 2011? He paints the most beautiful things, like trash bears, and sexy Werner Herzog. One time he drew this horse—

—in response to one of my all-time favorite games called Nobody Knows What a Horse Looks Like, which obviously I ended up writing a poem about, called Nobody Knows What a Horse Looks Like, and I’ll be honest, I love my horse poem. And also Tully, and sunflowers—the way they refuse to live any other way than with the sun on their face—and my small dog Mimsy, about whom I’ve created, somewhat on accident or at the very least unintentionally, a TikTok at my big, big age, and the moon when it rose over the mountains the other night, full and orange beyond a herd of elk as they laid in the meadow we stood beside, watching the night become real, and all of my gorgeous, marvelous friends, whose lives I cannot quite believe, some days, I get to know and witness and be some small part of, even if it’s just one day a decade.

It’ll be a beautiful day.

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Nobody knows what a horse looks like.

It's a simple trick, really. I say this out loud, 
then sit back and watch the horse drawings roll in.

When I die, they'll find them all 
gathered in a box beneath my bed.

Beautiful, monstrous, not-horse looking 
things I called into existence.

Now you tell me who I ought to believe in.