She Lets Her Hair Down
Today it was the memory of my horse's mane
under my hands as I groomed my own hair, both
memory and present moment coarse in texture, my hair
so long I now loop it into a french knot towards the back
of my head and let it ride upon my neck. So much
remembered seems bittersweet, the childhood tale
of a woman in a tower, she who let her hair down
to allow her rescuer a ladder, a means to reach her,
bear her into ever after. Here I bind myself to whatever after
I will find. I wonder if the fabled Rapunzel once rescued,
thought wistfully of her time in the tower, of the fragile
nature of solitude. A thing enforced is not necessarily
a thing to be fought, like a wild horse bucking
yet another rider from his back. I have come to treasure
my rooms in this wing, where few come
now, only the maid with my meals and my trusted
nurse, Miriam. She and I have slipped into a rhythm
of our own, I the heavy weight at the end
of her metronome. She brings me stories enough
from the world outside, while below, my family
is given to the low, cultured tones of their class.
You can imagine my amazement then, at hearing
the sound of my father's voice, raised
in anger. Miriam had gone out, I rolled myself
to the head of the stairs, curious. But it was the voice
that answered him that shocked me most deeply,
given the meaning clear in the words it spoke:
"Sir, I could not stand myself another day
not to tell you. All these yearsI have blamed myself
for her fall. All these years I had hoped to make it up
to her somehow, show her part of the world all of you
have given me, share some small part of its freedom
with her. I ask only time, and your permission to try
to win her hand. Please Sir, I pray you reconsider."
My father's voice roared out in rejoinder, "Mark me now.
No daughter of mine will wed such a shameless
opportunist as I now see you to be," followed
by the sound of the front door opening, a gust
of gorse-scented breeze, and suddenly I am back
in that afternoon, riding hard towards the cairn,
unaware of him drawing under the tree. Urging
the horse up, up and then, yes, I remember now,
he called to me, said, "Fly, Alice fly!" and I turned
towards the sound of his voice, jerking the reins
and then I flew. I surely flew.
Like the lines that link those star stories he is ever eager
to show me, my own story falls into place. Why
he brought me all those gifts, why even after
he had become so respected and well-known
he always looked at me with a certain shyness,
looked too closely into my eyes as if to see if the memory
of what had really happened that day was gaining on me
in defiance of the laws of the ever-expanding
universe. What I had taken for insensitivity
and foolish pride in his own accomplishments
was instead a penance and a door into
a world he felt he had deprived me. What a fool
I have been not to see it so, to think instead
that Celia would be the better mate for a man
who walked so well in the world.
There: is that his careful tread upon the stair?
It does not take many steps for him
to see that I am waiting at the top, have
heard it all, am waiting not with anger
in my eyes but with forgiveness,
as I slowly let my long hair down, the pins
falling one by one to the floor.
