Notes from the Motherline

of wild mares and Tristan's many-colored sea

                                                                        1.

                                                        River Teign, Dartmoor

In the early morning, her mother stands among the wild mares and their foals. She watches the foals nurse. Every mare has a child with her. Later she talks about their forelocks— how thick and curly they were, those little foals. The mares are wide-hipped. They are small and wise as heather brush, as the low-bellied stones, as steady river rocks between fresh channels. Their milk is made of moor plants.

Later, when the women go together to the standing stones, other wild ponies have left their marks along the way, and especially where the two rivers meet. They are hidden away then, out of sight, but it is easy to see they have been here. There is a boulder in the river with a great round hole in it that people have been climbing through for thrice-nine and thrice-nine generations. Women most of all, the daughter thinks, to bless the children born or waiting to be born. She has brought lady’s mantle in an armload from the longhouse on the moor, and heavy old cottage roses. She feels like a full grown woman for the first time in her life, with a midwife’s herb in her arms, climbing through the riverstone. Maybe it’s just what peace and a good appetite after so long without one have done to her body, rounding the edges, heavying her hips.