ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Carolyn Oliver’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, The Shallow Ends, The Greensboro Review, Booth, Gulf Stream, Lunch Ticket, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. A graduate of The Ohio State University and Boston University, she lives in Massachusetts with her family.
The Horse I Would Have Chosen
In memoriam Eric Van Cleve
Strong enough to pull past and future graveward
sly tail flicking no rhythm
Quiet, just the whuff of working breath to break
the crush of gravel under wheels
Smelling of oiled tack and hay and clean horse sweat
to cover indecent lilies
Not expected black or shocking white but gray,
marble limestone granite gray
Mist scuffing low around the mountains gray,
fog shrouding a spring road gray
Indecisive dawn gray, weathered dock gray,
rime on the fallow fields gray
Gray of shadow, gray of smoke, gray of ashes
gray of my hair ten years on
A wild gray horse who’d stop and slip his harness,
leap the opened ground, the low wall
Melt into the afternoon’s wide planes, passing
out of Ohio and into the world
Eric Van Cleve, a poet, is buried in his hometown cemetery, not far from a low stone wall. He died in 2008 at age twenty-five, one week shy of his MFA reading.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
