Equestrian

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He’s beautiful —

but his legs are wrong, says my mother

when I show her a picture

of what my friend the sculptor made

out of chicken wire and plaster, a life-size horse.

In a pick-up, my friend and I circled the marsh,

beast in the bed she rode

red-jumpsuit-and-velvet-helmeted

as if she was a fox chaser.

She didn’t mean to look so fascist.

What made the horse wrong

was the angle of his knees

or something off with the fetlocks

or other slight accommodations made to support

the weight of the medium.

That horses walk at all is a wonder.

That we ride them, another. If he was real —

You’d have to shoot him, says my mother.