Half my childhood my father carried in his
dusty pocket
a miniature on a key chain, warm as a penny
when you rubbed it with your thumb.
Real ones lined a neighbor’s drive, an uncle’s
flower bed,
and above the door of my grandfather’s grocery
a parade shoe hung heels up
to keep what luck he had from spilling.
Wherever I looked there were horseshoes –
silver buckles, copper bracelets,
and dozens of pony shoes on the tack room
floor,
strewn among the nails
you could throw like darts. Sometimes my
cousin
rubbed a horseshoe before a test,
or carried it to school in her book bag.
A pharmacist at the Rexall, a man
I feared, wore a bright one of diamonds
in the hairs of a finger.
Everyone then seemed to need luck.
In that, at least, we’re all old fashioned.
Just last year a woman in Montana
bought a horseshoe
from a blacksmith who’d hammered it into a
heart.
She mailed it to my wife as a valentine.
Every few weeks it jars me awake,
clanging on the back porch, among the wind
chimes.
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