Wild Horses

            Seraph Young Ford, Maryland, 1887

            First woman to vote in Utah and the modern nation, February 14, 1870.

I am known, if at all, for a moment’s

            pride: first American woman

in the modern nation

            to vote though at the time

I wasn’t considered American

            by all. Not modern, either,

but Mormon, one

            the East Coast suffragists had hoped

would vote Utah’s scourge of polygamy

            out. But plural marriage

was on no ballot

            I ever saw. Why would it be,

my mother asked, when men

            make laws and shape

their women’s choice in freedoms?

            And how changeable

those freedoms are

            denied or given

certain women, she knew, who saw

            a Shoshone woman one day selling ponies

from a stall: watched, amazed,

            her pocket all the earnings

without a husband’s permission.

            I wouldn’t be a white girl

for all the horses

            in the world, the woman scoffed

at her astonishment: my mother

            who never sold an apple

without my father’s

            say-so. Like my mother,

I married young, to an older man who believed—

            like certain, stiff-backed politicians—

to join the union, Utah

            must acculturate, scrub off

the oddities and freedoms

            of its difference, renounce

some part of politics and faith:

            our secrecy and marriage customs,

and then my woman’s right to vote. All gone

            to make us join

the “modern” state—

            And so perhaps I might be known

for what I’ve lost: a right, a home,

            and now my mother, who died

the year we moved back East.

            How fragile, indeed, are rights

and hopes, how unstable the powers

            to which we grow attached.

My husband now can barely leave his bed.

            As he’s grown ill, I’ve watched myself

become the wife

            of many men, as all men in the end

become husband

            to a congregation of women.

When he dies, I’ll move back West

            to where my mother’s buried

and buy some land with the money

            that she left—

To me alone she wrote,

            who loved me,

and so for love of her

            I’ll buy a house

and marble headstone

            and fill my land with horses.