I. Hodegetria
Naturally the horse was raised by politically radical lesbians
They did not permit me to be seen by any man
Until I found my path
They read me Joyce Mansour and Thunder: Perfect Mind and Gunslinger by the light of yellow lightbulbs next to fly strips in the barn.
They let me stay with my mother as I grew.
Their farm in the territory of Monadnock
in sight of the Seven Sisters
they taught me the constellations.
My mother taught me to sing, very softly
My mother taught me to pray
with the grasses
rain in the leaves
the hour before dawn
I ran every day, sometimes twice.
The women held a meeting with me, and my mother was there, to ask if I would be willing to bear a person, a rider. My mother said:
It is a choice you can make, one that will direct your course either way. She said: you are strange and free and what you choose matters. She told me I was born in an epic
Thunder-snow-storm at the first new moon of spring, that a great owl had roosted in the barn where I was born, that she would never forget the deep brown-gold of the owl’s eyes who gave her my name, a word she had not heard