Shaving

Shaving is political the twelve-year old says
as if she has ever shaved, as if she was my
daughter. Her gait is lopsided and lovely
in the way of a colt that has just emerged
from her mother’s womb, fully-formed
yet insecure for years. I remember
wishing I was a horse girl at her age,
my legs as hairy as a foal and as dangerous.
How self-assured and confident those girls were!
Their pure love for an animal that could snap
their backs and trample them in an instant.
Each summer we watched them perform at the Big E,
knuckles tight on their reins, manes coiffed better
than the hair on any of our heads.
Our cousins had a beautiful white horse, Benazir,
whom I loved but wasn’t allowed to ride lest my allergies
kill me. I haven’t thought of Benny in years
but I’m reading Ada Limón and learning more
about breeding mares and stallions than ever.
And I’m American enough to have a sense
of what it means to have bred a thoroughbred
but grew up betting on the greyhounds in New Hampshire
instead of saddling up to tame my own horseheart.
I remember Gramps handing me twenty-dollar bills
to bet on the dog I thought would win each time we went.
It never worked save the one time I guessed
the dog that ambled slow as molasses with his trainer,
then rabidly raced toward the rabbit: a whirlwind, a hunter, a
reverie. The twelve-year-old rolls a candy
cigarette between her fingers like I did at her age,
sighing and pretending to know it all, the knowing
just a pantomime of adults doing their adult stuff.
I’m seeing the ways in which we lack the same things now:
Around us the horse girls, all of them,
circle around us both, steady as can be
with the weight of a thousand hooves
thundering underneath,
the manes of our legs unshorn.