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786 Vivian Shipley “The Last Wild Horses in Kentucky” Vivian Shipley was born in Chicago but grew up in Kentucky in and around Hardin County, where her family were farmers—“hillbillies,” she fondly calls them. She was educated at the University of Kentucky in the 1960s and received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt in 1975. Since 1969 she has taught at Southern Connecticut University , where she also edits the Connecticut Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous prestigious periodicals and have been collected under such titles as Poems Out of Harlan County (1989), Fair Haven (2000), and WhenThere Is No Shore (2002). Her poems are filled with allusions to her Kentucky childhood: “No Connecticut roots, / my mind’s back in Cecilia, Kentucky, the cellar house / where Grandma kept green mason jars she’d filled last fall.” The following poem involves another return to Kentucky. h We stand at the bus stop. Eyeing my son and me, the other children are quiet and they look hard. It’s not their first day of class. My fingers tighten over my hand at six years: cowbarn, outhouse, backdoor, cornbread, woodpile, chickenhouse. I rode a plowhorse named Snip, no big yellow bus. Our greyhound, Queenie, uncurled from under a forsythia bush outside the kitchen, leaping to race me, but my father held her by the collar. Before I rode off, he told me about the last wild horses in Kentucky. Scoured out of hills, they were roped, tied down, nostrils clamped shut. Their neck veins pulsed like salmon jumping upstream. The mares all aborted. I know beyond that word. Hanging limp as morning wet grass, my son’s hands are smooth not toughened from milking a cow as mine were by the time I went to first grade. I want to double fence a pasture to protect him like my father did to keep our stallions apart in order to keep them spirited for breeding. Eric waits, but strains The author’s name 787 to see beyond the corner as I puIl him back, fearing roads I cannot see him travel. The day must come when I’ll force his snowsuited body out, without immunity, into January mornings so cold milk jugs would freeze if I left them out on doorsteps. Can I be ready with a message to pin on him as his boots scale snow, tracking maps I have not traced? Boarding the bus, Eric twists around to me from the landing and I reach out to touch his shoulder, then stand waving him out of sight. My stomach cupped in hands, I bow my head and let my son go. Knowing how wild horses are broken, I pray he will remember the soles of his bare feet running through bluegrass blooming over hills in Hardin County. Vivian Shipley 787 ...

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