fifty years or more and still I remember—passing by turning back staring into your bottomless eyes staring at the swing of that skiver certain as a noose your horse’s feet devouring derelict track as you plunge through mud-spattered darkness bone-for-unforgiving-bone leaning hard into the inevitable barreling towards the horizon toward the claw-fisted miasma above the hard-edged hills thundering toward the point where all that is vanishes

Racetrack (Death on a Pale Horse), 1895–1910
Oil on canvas by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Publisher’s Note:

While the original Racetrack by Albert Pinkham Ryder resides at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the painting is in the public domain. The reproduction above was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Kathryn J. Stevens

worked in marketing communications with IBM and before that with one of the schools in The State University of New York at Albany. Her poems have been published recently in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Ribbons. In the 1990s while she was living in Texas, her poetry appeared in several regional journals including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Sulphur River Literary Review, as well as on the poetry page of The Texas Observer. In August 1998, one of her poems received third place in the Southwest Writers Workshop (Albuquerque, New Mexico). She currently lives with her husband in Cary, North Carolina.