Poetry by Robert Harlow
They don’t think much about it,
I suspect, the horses, the snow.
Probably wonderstruck the first time
they stand in it, as it falls on and around them.
As long as they have something to eat,
mostly hay, unbaled, strewn, disheveled,
they are fine, it seems. Nonchalant.
At least that’s what they look like. Their pose.
And there’s always one, isn’t there,
who is off by himself, looking
to the distance he can’t get to.
Even though he’s never been there,
he wonders if there’s a way he can.
Somehow, he’ll have to convince the others,
nodding into the feed, to cover for him
by creating one of their famous diversions
as he tries to figure out how to open the gate,
because he has to live with the mistake he made
of not learning how to be a jumper
as I tried to teach him to be.
And he can’t secretly disassemble the rails
without me seeing him, catch him in the act,
putting on the “What? I wasn’t doing nothing” face.
Even though he is dark-gray, intermittently rain-smooth
when he needs to be, snow won’t help hide him,
as he thinks it will, or fill in his hoof prints
on the other side if he somehow remembers
what I tried to teach him about going over obstacles
one might encounter in this often-puzzling world.
So, he’ll have to be content,
or at least pretend to be, with his lot in life.
We have so much in common, he and I, don’t we?
He staring off into his distance.
Me staring off into mine.
Robert Harlow resides in upstate NY. He is the author of Places Near and Far (Louisiana Literature, 2018). His poems appear in Poetry Northwest, RHINO, Slipstream Magazine, and elsewhere.
