On Seeing On the Tow Path—A Halt, by Kevin J. McDaniel

On the Tow Path, a Halt, by Theodore Robinson (USA) 1893.

On Seeing On the Tow Path—A Halt

Theodore Robinson, where is your boy
        in brown cap, brown coat, brown britches

rambling to down a dirt pathway?
        If a snake slinked in front of his horses,

I bet he’d handclasp the reins 
        as the white and brown brutes trample greenery
    
dabbed on a steep mountain slope.
        He’d hock spittle and brush off his pant legs
    
before casting again a dogged stare
        that your brush arrested in the minute

when he might’ve looked back
        at his rundown daddy who decided it was time

for a son’s journey under blue laundered sky,
        the morning a boy becomes a man. ​

Kevin J. McDaniel

Kevin J. McDaniel's poems have appeared in Artemis Journal, Cloudbank, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Illuminations, Sand Hills, Temenos, The Ocean State Review, The Offbeat, and others. He is the author of two chapbooks, Family Talks (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and At the Foot of a Mountain (Old Seventy Creek Press, 2018), in addition to a forthcoming book of poetry, Rubbernecking (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2019).