Horse
I have never seen a soul detach from it’s gender,
but I’d like to. I’d like to see my own that way,
free of its female tethers. Maybe it would be like
riding a horse. The rider’s the human one,
but everyone looks at the horse.
By Chase Twichell
The 8th year of my life was dominated by being a horse rider; my canter was sublime, the Grey my favoured steed. It was an all encompassing profound yearning; our open plan garden was my arena, with a suitable ranch style boundary fence. Almost past the post, I visited the stables with my mother to find out about riding lessons.
During the summer holiday preceding the September riding lessons, I travelled back to the UK for an appointment in London at St Guy’s Hospital. Professor Maurice Lessof became the most benign dharma assassian. The weapon was a diagnosis of severe allergies to all flora and fauna, (feathers as an adjunct). More than nose snivelling with itchy eyes, but hospitalisation, asthma, lungs swamped and serious suffering for a wee child and uncertain parents.
This poem Horse was a Thor thunder bolt, the power and impact still undiminished at each subsequent read. The bullseye lies in the specific (and for me personal) metaphor; Chase captures a throbbing longing, which the poem embodies in a few elegant lines. It captures how I aspire to live in a few elegant lines.
I remember a visit to a racing stables just outside Brussels in Belgium and the intense awe I experienced at being in the presence of these majestic animals. The kinaesthetic memory and the remote viewing of little Lucy in that courtyard is still, now, 49 years later, woven into the fabric of my being.
The sense liberating joy I felt as I cantered, galloped, strutted, performed, played and became in our garden as that human rider, was a release from the discomfort of being Lucy. In those words I see the means to connect to our unadulterated “beingness” our self-creating, self-evolving, multi varied, fluid and precious selves. Unshackled from the projections of others, of culture, community, of narratives reinforced willy nilly, the inflammatory tropes around gender and biological sex, stultifying misogyny in all it’s guises.
I can see myself, my untethered soul, in ever increasing circles.
Until next time my fabulous friends
Lucy
Lucy, thank you for sharing this poem and your reflections on it. From my point of view on this poem, it describes living in imaginary world as imaginary character, to escape desperate reality. I had been in that world very often. Sometimes for years, but I always return to accept and embrace my reality, after I realized that real beauty of life may be recognized only by being aware and conscious of present moment, and taking it as it is.
However, your reflections when read that poem are very much real, they are your experiences from beautiful moments happened in the real life, because you were there—you had 'a rider's soul free of its female tethers', you “were the horse” you liked so much—when you ride your hors as a child. When you read that poem, you may once more experience such a soul-freedom and excitement about riding lessons, mixed with disappointment and longing, because of cancelled riding lessons due to force majeure.