white pony by Bonnie Proudfoot

The white pony died on a January night,
it might have been below 0, no snow,
just one of those clear, cold-snap nights.
He died where he liked to stand, just outside
the barn, while our other pony, the gold one,
would stand just inside, seeking shelter,
nose to nose. From the barn I saw him,
as if asleep, but frozen already, legs splayed,
no cloud of breath, no warmth left. When
we got him he was old, maybe thirty,
judging by the wear on his teeth, a lifetime
of grinding. He'd been a coal mine pony,
and lost his right eye, the socket healed
into a pink fist of scar tissue, the other eye
pale blue with a dark grey center, bloodshot,
pink lashes, a short white mane, a small
round white belly that sagged like an
unmade day bed without springs, his spine,
a line of rocks in a shallow stream, his withers
a shaggy snowy hillock. We called him Cyclops.
Why not? And saddled him up at birthday parties
and sleepovers. Unlike the other pony,
he never tried to buck or shy. We led him
around the paddock, or set him out to
graze, watched him outside in the rain,
the snow, his pink lashes barely blinking, tail
flicking flies, pink hooves smaller than my palms.
I used to picture him, hunched in some tunnel,
carting wagons of black sooty rock, keeping
his head down. A small thing, glowing. He
made it out. We waited until the ground
thawed, started digging not far from the barn,
where the hillside sloped away. It could've
been half a day, piling stones and clay, then
we hitched up the other pony, and guided
the traces as he dragged the small white stiff
shell of his only friend. One living pony, sides
heaving with a weight barely possible to know,
one dead one, shut eye toward the ground,
open eye staring empty at the sky.



Born in NY, Bonnie Proudfoot now resides in Athens, Ohio. She writes poetry, reviews, fiction, and essays. Her novel, Goshen Road (Swallow Press, 2020) received WCONA’s Book of the Year and was long-listed for PEN/Hemingway. Her chapbook, Household Gods, (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2022), includes poems published in Red Eft Review.