A horse stands in the cold while someone idly wonders what goes on in its head. That is the whole situation of "Who Knows," but Judson Crews spreads it across seven three-line stanzas and turns a throwaway musing into a small, sly joke with a human edge.
The poem is built as one long, wandering question. Read the stanzas straight through and you get something like: a tired white old nag, forlorn among the sagebrush on a cold day, are his thoughts only of the cold and the weariness? How would he feel with a belly full of straw in a warm stable? Would he then be thinking of young mares? There is no punctuation anywhere, not even a question mark, so the speculation drifts from one hypothetical to the next without ever settling. The title works the same way. "Who Knows" is half an honest admission, since nobody can say what a horse thinks, and half a shrug that invites us to guess anyway.
The guesses climb a ladder of needs, and they do it by moving down the body. First comes the cold, then the belly and its straw, and finally the groin. Warmth, food and sex arrive in that order, each possible only once the one before it is met. The opening stanzas pile on the misery almost to the edge of sentimentality: "tired," "old nag," "forlorn," "weariness." The word "nag" is itself dismissive, a name for a horse nobody values. "Sagebrush" suggests dry, open country with little shelter, and "white" leaves the animal as one more faded thing in a bare landscape. That is an inference from the imagery, but it fits the poem's mood. The pity is thick enough that the ending lands as a surprise.
That ending depends on a drop in register. "Disquiet / fomenting / a tempest" is grand, Latinate language. "Fomenting" usually belongs to rebellions and "tempest" to storms at sea, and the cold weather of the first half now seems to have moved inside the horse. Then the last stanza deflates it: "In his / itching / balls." The line breaks control the timing. "In his" hangs there as an unfinished phrase, "itching" adds a small, undignified irritation, and the final blunt monosyllable arrives like a punchline. After all that lofty vocabulary, the storm turns out to be an itch.
The rhythm supports the joke. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run to two, three or four syllables, so the reading keeps slowing almost to a stop, like the horse planted among the brush. A capital letter opens every stanza even though nothing is punctuated, which gives the poem a stop-and-start pace. The sounds shift too. "Full of straw" and "stable" are soft and settled, while "disquiet" and "tempest" bring harder k and t sounds that jolt the ear just before the final stanza.
The central idea is that appetite is stubborn and not at all dignified. Comfort doesn't bring peace. It only clears space for the next want, and age and weariness don't switch the wanting off. The contrast between "old nag" and "young mares" makes the point sharper, because desire keeps going after strength has faded. The poem never says the horse stands for anyone, but a speaker who invents such thoughts for an animal may be revealing something about his own. "Who Knows" can then be read as an admission as well as a shrug.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It uses plain words, a single sentence and a few careful line breaks to move from pathos to comedy to a surprisingly honest observation about bodies. It refuses to make the horse noble or the longing romantic, and that bluntness is where the humor and the truth of the poem both come from.