aemy
20th May 2007, 23:50
Athletics and animals - some hard acts to follow on this thread.
Still, it's spring.
Arcadian Grace
She was a big chestnut mare, bred and built for the track. But perhaps not quite fast enough, not well enough trained or jockeyed among the many contenders in the wealthy, ruthless world of thoroughbred racing. And so she came, with pride and power and breeding, by circuitous routes, to the lesser world of calculating dealers and riding schools.
I did not know then that against all expectations, the chestnut mare would make her way to me. My husband Nick and I, looking but expecting only quick and incomplete impressions, were both taken with her: her cinnamon coat, her elegant head, one white sock behind – eye-catching and appealing, but not after all unique. What was not predictable, what were wholly her own and riveting, were her buoyant gaits. Extended, extravagant, she stretched and played as she trotted the fence-line of the central paddock. Collected, she gathered herself into a Renaissance coil of arcing neck and ready haunch muscles. She was showing off, her studied play her own delight and ours. Taking a liberty - we knew the stable owner - we opened the gate to a larger field and watched the mare’s gallop lengthen, flooding into the sheer joy of acceleration; generations of breeding, years of careful choices, this sire, that dam, now leaping into neck, shoulders, and hindquarters. Passion, a kind of physical eloquence. Not one hoof seemed to touch the ground as she moved into a rhetoric of speed so seemingly effortless, so supple, that in her intense challenge to mere distance, she ran not on the green stubble of the pasture itself, but floated inches above it. Stable-hands, normally blasé to all but the routine of feeding-and-mucking-out, watched from the corners of the barn. Nick and I, familiar with four-wheel speed and airborne flight, stood transfixed, as though the hand of some Arcadian god had deftly turned a favourite key; as if for an instant the muddy barnyard pond remembered the gleam of an ancient bearded smile.
We bought the mare. I took up again the riding I’d begun as a child and in the summer we trailered round to small shows. Daily there were the simple busy acts of grooming, cleaning out of hooves, shifting the straw, the glossy yellow bedding of her box-stall. Taking care. A gentle animal and quiet in her own square space; indoors she observed, complied, became accustomed to ministrations. But very rarely in the small flow of attentions, I felt a pause. I recognised the drift of warm breath over my hair from a head much taller than my own. Intimate, unprompted, it seemed in its rough setting as clear as a caress. The gods of Arcadia were still awake and watchful, their benign gaze unbroken by the passing of millennia. Untouched, unmoved by the smear of a more dangerous and graceless age, they remembered their traditions. And in the old, respected way, they sent their emissaries.
Still, it's spring.
Arcadian Grace
She was a big chestnut mare, bred and built for the track. But perhaps not quite fast enough, not well enough trained or jockeyed among the many contenders in the wealthy, ruthless world of thoroughbred racing. And so she came, with pride and power and breeding, by circuitous routes, to the lesser world of calculating dealers and riding schools.
I did not know then that against all expectations, the chestnut mare would make her way to me. My husband Nick and I, looking but expecting only quick and incomplete impressions, were both taken with her: her cinnamon coat, her elegant head, one white sock behind – eye-catching and appealing, but not after all unique. What was not predictable, what were wholly her own and riveting, were her buoyant gaits. Extended, extravagant, she stretched and played as she trotted the fence-line of the central paddock. Collected, she gathered herself into a Renaissance coil of arcing neck and ready haunch muscles. She was showing off, her studied play her own delight and ours. Taking a liberty - we knew the stable owner - we opened the gate to a larger field and watched the mare’s gallop lengthen, flooding into the sheer joy of acceleration; generations of breeding, years of careful choices, this sire, that dam, now leaping into neck, shoulders, and hindquarters. Passion, a kind of physical eloquence. Not one hoof seemed to touch the ground as she moved into a rhetoric of speed so seemingly effortless, so supple, that in her intense challenge to mere distance, she ran not on the green stubble of the pasture itself, but floated inches above it. Stable-hands, normally blasé to all but the routine of feeding-and-mucking-out, watched from the corners of the barn. Nick and I, familiar with four-wheel speed and airborne flight, stood transfixed, as though the hand of some Arcadian god had deftly turned a favourite key; as if for an instant the muddy barnyard pond remembered the gleam of an ancient bearded smile.
We bought the mare. I took up again the riding I’d begun as a child and in the summer we trailered round to small shows. Daily there were the simple busy acts of grooming, cleaning out of hooves, shifting the straw, the glossy yellow bedding of her box-stall. Taking care. A gentle animal and quiet in her own square space; indoors she observed, complied, became accustomed to ministrations. But very rarely in the small flow of attentions, I felt a pause. I recognised the drift of warm breath over my hair from a head much taller than my own. Intimate, unprompted, it seemed in its rough setting as clear as a caress. The gods of Arcadia were still awake and watchful, their benign gaze unbroken by the passing of millennia. Untouched, unmoved by the smear of a more dangerous and graceless age, they remembered their traditions. And in the old, respected way, they sent their emissaries.