Carolyn Oliver

Horses in the Mist

I would like this to be a poem about rising early
on an Adirondack morning after an ice storm,
counting ghost apples he could melt
with a graze of his small fiery fingers
as we follow a split-rail fence to a pasture
where foals and mares, their largeness daunting,
flare their breath into the mist.
In this poem I would be the kind of woman
who carries sugar cubes in her pocket,
whose son becomes, as the haze dissolves,
a little less afraid. 

But I have never risen in the Adirondacks
and it is not morning. There was no ice storm
last night, just a phone call, so I am counting
all the ways boys know how to make ghosts
as I follow the road to school alone.
I am the kind of woman who carries
her son’s health insurance card in her pocket.
There are still horses in the mist, he could touch them
if the classroom windows dissolved.
On their backs sway men with guns
so he won’t be afraid.

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Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Carolyn’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST and elsewhere. carolynoliver.net.