Ask the River to Talk About the Horses (MoonPath Press 2026)
By Judith Waller Carroll
Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
Although Judith Waller Carroll and I grew up in Montana in the same household with the same cowboy/teacher father and homemaker mother, her chapbook, Ask the River to Talk about the Horses, was a delightful surprise to me since being three years younger than me, she had a life I didn’t know about or remember and she saw life in color, while I viewed it in black and white. Her poems are as powerful as the rivers and horses she describes in great detail, as charming as the characters in the corals and classrooms and as musical as the Hank Williams and Patsy Cline songs blaring from the jukebox at the Honky Tonks.
About the Book
In Ask the River to Talk About the Horses, Judith Waller Carroll writes about her native Montana— the horses, the rivers, the dust, tumbleweeds and silent cowboys who take their whisky straight—with candor, affection and humor. In poems that take the reader through childhood in Montana, adolescence in Idaho and back to Montana for college, Carroll brings back memories of a simpler time where the sultry sax brought the gym lights down to dim and the family drove to the closest big town for school clothes and Christmas presents, then stopped for malted milks after.
About the Author
Judith Waller Carroll is the author of What You Saw and Still Remember, a runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Award, The Consolation of Roses, winner of the 2015 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Prize, and Walking in Early September (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, published in numerous journals and anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Here are a few of my favorite poems:
Ask the River to Talk About the Horses
How their hoof beats scattered the leaves
that fell from the trees each autumn,
the reflection of their colors
turning the water to rust and blood.
Still, the horses drank and sometimes crossed
where the current was slower,
their manes flowing like wind
each sigh and nicker echoing across the sky,
the river witnessing it all.
All those years you walked
along its swift waters in restless silence.
The river could’ve told you
how it feels to be wild.
Landscape, with Horses
Even from this distance of miles and time
I can see the slight rise of the hill
that signaled the turn to the rutted road,
swirling with tumbleweeds and dust,
where my grandfather steered his jeep
past the grandstand, the chutes, to the sun-bleached
corrals where the whinnying horses waited.
I watched from the fence while he filled
long troughs with water from a spigot.
In summer, some of these corrals held the broncs
that tested the toughest cowboys,
but these were local horses boarded year round
and cared for by my grandfather
who chuckled and cooed as he pitchforked hay,
the way he talked to Buster, his ten-year-old terrier
who rode between us as we bucked and bounced
back to the highway, crossed the covered bridge
over the river that eddied through cattails
and cottonwoods, passed the Bar K campground
with the old log cabin, and ended up on Main Street
with its sandstone buildings that housed the bank,
the post office and the Atlas Bar.
Around the corner and a few blocks over
my mother was humming along to the radio,
doing the crossword in the morning’s Gazette.
Glad to have a few hours to herself.
The Cowboys I Grew Up With
Didn’t talk much.
Liked their whiskey straight.
Lit their Camels
with a wooden match
struck on the soles of their boots
its flare filling the silence
then turning to smoke.
Nellie
.
Every summer, my horseman father
would try to address my fear, coax me
to ride the mild-mannered mare, a hybrid
of Arabian and plow-horse, the one
all the kids rode first, no heart-stopping
bucking and raring, as calm and sweet-natured
as her name implied. I was unyielding
in my refusal, though I fed her apples
from my hand and brushed her daily,
a model of the perfect horsewoman
he wanted me to grow up to be.
Horse Dancing
Flags on every street corner,
the gazebo in the park festooned
with red, white and blue.
Townspeople, ranchers
and folks from neighboring towns
even smaller than ours
gathered along Main to watch horses,
floats, kids on bikes, baton twirlers
and the Columbus High Marching Band
wind their way from the high school,
past the creamery, down the six blocks of Main.
And at the head of the parade, my father,
holding the American flag
and sitting astride his white horse, Zephyr,
who looked every inch the regal steed.
Every block or so, the parade would pause
while Zephyr danced sideways, strutted
backwards, reared up, then high-stepped
back to the center and took a bow.
The flag—nor my father—
never once losing their composure.
Is You Is or Is You Ain’t
The weather is doing its usual tease,
a glimmer of sky flirting through the clouds
like a fickle lover on one of those scratchy LPs
Mr. Winchester played for us in sixth grade.
We were used to heartache in songs, but the cowboys
on the radio drowned theirs in whiskey or beer.
These scorned lovers took action—told the cad
to hit the road or whipped out a pistol and shot him.
His point, of course, was not for us to shoot
someone who didn’t love us,
but to educate our ears to different kinds of music
—jazz, blues, songs by Fats Waller and Bessie Smith—
plaintive notes and desperate words floating
in the air like chalk dust, Mr. Winchester at his desk,
scanning the room, blue eyes cool
behind tortoise-shell rims
and in the back row, dreamy-eyed, I was in love
with these songs and all that they stood for:
that it was possible to sink as low as you could go,
then slowly rise up, better than you were before.
Shucking Corn
A late-August evening, still warm
but hinting of fall. A few grasshoppers
flicked from the cornstalks to the lawn.
My big sister and I sat on the steps,
cornsilk sliding through our fingers
into the bushel basket,
clean ears of corn dropping
into the pot between us,
our own ears tuned to the porch
where Mama and Aunt Babs
hashed over the news from Billings
about Sue, our 15-year-old cousin,
just a few months older than my sister
but already going places—
cheerleader, Honors English,
everybody’s bet for college—
the example Mama held up
when our grades slipped to Bs.
Got her in trouble
and have to get married
was all we could pick up
before Daddy stepped out, newspaper
in one hand, glasses in the other,
his deep voice low. Careful. The girls.
Over by the hollyhocks, a frog
began to croak. A breeze cut through
the still air and caused me to shiver.
Funny how the slightest shift in weather
could jolt us into a new season,
how swiftly everything could change.
Honkey-Tonk Girl
All those years living so close
to my grandfather’s bar
taught me two things: whisky
could take an ordinary moment
and turn it into a dream or a nightmare,
and music could make you ache
at the beauty of loneliness.
The jukebox would play “Crazy”
or “Walking after Midnight”
and the woman I longed to become
would float out of my body
on a voice as pure
as a bird’s first song at day break.
And always the steel guitar, weeping.
Ordering information: https://www.moonpathpress.com/JudithWallerCaroll.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment