An elevator that moves sideways
is a train you hope
won’t derail as it travels
the length of the Empire State Building,

if skyscrapers slept facedown
like owlets, not standing up
like their mothers.
You spot an irruption

of boreal ones
the same night as a spectacular
showing of northern lights
over Lake Superior.

Finally, you get it:

Eavan Boland’s lime and violet manes
may as well belong to that herd
of majestic wild horses
chasing the solar wind—

those ghosts no one would dare tame.

Note: This poem references Eavan Boland’s poem “The Carousel in the Park” from her collection Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990 (W.W. Norton & Company, New York).