As her car left the curving rise in the road
at a hundred miles an hour—radio
piercing the night like a cry from a dream—
and rolled slowly to the right in midair,
the foal slipped from the little black mare
struggling in her stall in the dark,
unattended, this tough birth come a week early,
the other mares nickering comfort
from stalls beyond the tack-shed.

As her father’s Lexus clipped the sturdy fence
and she broke through the windshield,
blue eyes expanded wide
as the soundless circle of her mouth,
the soft skin scored by the shattering glass,
the owner rose from the shallow sleep
in which he heard what he could not hear:
the shuffle of hooves, the thin voice,
the gentle onset on the barn’s steel roof
of the rain perfuming the dusty July field-grass.

As the car nestled down atop her,
pressing out the final breath of life,
chassis thrust rudely toward the clouds—
the only sounds the soft hiss of rain on hot metal
and the slow spinning of one crooked wheel—
he turned his lantern on the quivering wet foal
prodded alive by the tired mare’s tongue,
while miles to the south her parents shifted gently
in dreams devoid of rain or dark, of all foreboding,
without presage of the shrilling phone
that would sear their night in an hour.

Ontario Review #53