Hans Ostrom’s lyric begins by refusing to treat memory as a filing system or photograph album. Instead, the opening line announces, “Tonight my memory is / a palomino exuberantly hooved / in an alpine meadow.” The image establishes memory as a living animal—golden, restless, and high up in open air. The odd compound “exuberantly hooved” matters because it gives the horse energy in its very feet; memory does not simply exist, it moves. The speaker climbs on “bareback,” a word that suggests both closeness and risk, and immediately falls, “replacing air / in lungs with fear.” The line break enacts the gasp: for a moment, air is absent, and fear fills the body. Yet the poem does not stay in panic. It moves across the stanza break into “pushing fear out and breathing / again.” Remembering, the poem suggests, is something to be survived and relearned.
The poem’s seven three-line stanzas create a loose, breath-like shape. There is no rhyme, but the sound texture is rich: “palomino exuberantly hooved” rolls on long o’s, while “flat palm,” “fat fly,” and “broom sounds” share short, tactile consonants. The line lengths vary, so the syntax sometimes rides smoothly and sometimes stumbles, much like the bareback speaker. When the speaker offers “a sugar-cube on a flat palm,” the poem shifts from fear to tenderness. Memory is not to be broken or controlled; it is coaxed. The palomino “nuzzles with a soft / gray mouth, nips / the cube, leaves lovely / equine slobber.” The surprising break before “equine slobber” places the word “lovely” next to something messy, and that juxtaposition is central: memory is both sweet and sloppy, beautiful and animal. The tail “flicks out / at a fat fly” and “makes broom sounds,” grounding the golden horse in ordinary barnyard life. Even the most radiant memory has flies.
The turn comes with sunlight, which is personified as “the old sheriff.” This figure grows naturally out of the western imagery—the palomino, the bareback riding—but it also introduces authority. The sheriff “jumps / up on my memory,” and the verb “jumps” suggests mounting, as if light itself rides the horse. Immediately “everything goes golden,” a phrase that echoes the palomino’s coat and anticipates the final emblem. The last stanza breaks the phrase “gathers / into a bright badge of / summer” so that the light seems to draw itself together slowly. A badge is a small, metal sign of identity and law; here, summer is compressed into a sheriff’s star, bright and wearable. The memory has not vanished. It has changed from a living animal into an insignia, still golden but now fixed.
The title, “The Ride, The Badge,” names that two-part transformation. The ride is the raw experience: risky, physical, full of fear and breath and sugar. The badge is what such experience can become when remembered light touches it. The poem’s central idea is that memory is not a neat record but a creature we ride and sometimes fall from; it must be approached with courage and gentleness, not force. What makes the lyric significant is how it makes this inner process fully sensory. Hoof, mouth, slobber, fly, sugar cube, sunlight and metal are all felt in the body. By the end, the reader understands why a summer afternoon might need to be ridden, breathed through, and gently fed before it consents to become a bright badge.