Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, when the blue-haired lady in the doctor’s
waiting room bends over the magazine table
and farts, just a little, and violently blushes, wouldn’t it be nice if intesti-
nal gas came embodied in visible clouds
so she could see that her really quite inoffensive pop had only barely
grazed my face before it drifted away?
Besides, for this to have happened now is a nice coincidence because not
an hour ago, while we were on our walk,
my dog was startled by a backfire and jumped straight up like a horse
bucking and that brought back to me
the stable I worked on weekends when I was twelve and a splendid
piebald stallion who whenever he was mounted
would buck just like that, though more hugely, of course, enormous,
gleaming, resplendent, and the woman,
her face abashedly buried in her Elle now, reminded me I’d forgotten
that not the least part of my awe
consisted of the fact that with every jump he took the horse would pow-
erfully fart, fwap, fwap, fwap,
something never mentioned in the dozens of books about horses and
their riders I devoured in those days.
All that savage grandeur, the steely glinting hooves, the eruptions driven
from the creature’s mightly innards:
breath stopped, heart stopped, nostrils madly flared, I didn’t know if I
wanted to break him or be him.
— C.K. Williams