I Merely Wished For Her To Fly
She thought I didn't notice tonight but I did: the subject
of the picture stretched within the confines of her embroidery
hoop. She was filling in the dark green metallic outline
of a griffon, but I could see the coming cage, pale
blue bars outlined upon the cloth. Tonight I tried again
to bring her a gift, this time the promise of light shining
from a cold black sky, but I can see I have merely upset her again.
When she lost the use of her legs it seems she lost all of her earlier
inclinations to soar. How different she is now from the young girl
I knew when I lived in the village and followed her
every adventure. Our family was poor but that never stopped me
from being alert and curious. Even the Masters thought I had promise,
if not the means to endow its pursuit. But she, she had everything
one could want, lawn parties and pretty friends and a tall
white stallion she was learning to ride. I was in the field
the day it all tumbled down for her, sketching her flight
over the rocky ground, trying to train my hand to capture
something so fleet yet delicate. She'd taken to jumping
the low stone wall at the end of the field, one with her horse
as if they'd both been glued to a pasteboard sky. Her parents
had forbidden her to try for higher, wider obstacles
but she was never one to be restrained. From the tree's shelter
I watched her glance over her shoulder, check that her tutor
had turned to watch her sister's pony run in silly ovals
in a neighboring field. Then she gathered herself up, dug
her heels into her horse's side and gee-upped towards
an old rock cairn in the middle of the next meadow. No one
ever really knew what happened next, as she forgot and I was
not about to tell: why the horse shied short of the cairn, refusing
to leap, then launched her like a small yellow-haired comet
onto the standing stones. Her back twisted and snapped
as if in sacrifice to some earlier god of earth and sky. Next
there was the sound of shouts, of footfall as many ran towards her,
the beginning of all the hows and whys she could never answer:
how I, gathering courage to speak by her willingness to take the risk
called out an encouraging word, why she'd chosen to turn
in her saddle towards me under the tree, how her
hands on the reins faltered just as they needed to urge the horse up,
why my desire to watch her fly had instead, permanently pinned
her to the earth, something once soaring, now broken.
This poem first appeared in Moveo Angelus, Volume One, Issue One
