Poetry

Fragments

Please forgive her fragments. She has had to live in fragments all her life. Bomb ruins with larkspur and persistent roses. Everything seemed normal. Carrots, cabbages, potatoes under red and white striped umbrellas in the marketplace among rubble not yet cleared. After all, survivors had to eat. Survivors and victors, both. Between early scraped knees and plastic pearls and later rhinestones and high heels, she has lived so quickly, none of this is really hers. Wise teachers would remind her, hey, we’re all in the same boat. This doesn’t really help when she is sitting in that boat feeling like a failure, feeling totally unimportant—and she is not even allowed to voice it, much less take it personally, though she is still required to live it personally. She has lived with cockroaches, scorpions, and misogyny. And still she loves what is. Though she confesses she is often afraid she is wasting God’s time. She is stranded in reality which tends to take much longer than she planned for. The chores. The repetitions. The longing to play for a while. Solitaire, or whatever is on hand. There were places she skipped through daily, and she took them for granted, castle walls, cathedrals, bridges, lakes. Now she can only visit them as tourist and at great expense. And even then, she cannot regain the moments she missed because she was rushing so relentlessly. Spirit says: there is no need to contain herself. She wonders. Lately she notices a trend to claim she and her kind have become too poor to save their planet; where once they recycled glass, plastic, and paper, now this has become too expensive, and they reuse things if they can or else they simply toss them. They can’t afford sanity either, it seems, because it all costs so much and only evil has enough money to further its own causes.She doesn’t know who to pray to, so she simply prays. For comfort she watches ice-skaters with complicated Russian names with just a tinge of envy on her part. They need not worry about anything except how to execute the most stunning maneuvers with acrobatic grace. Just look how they master beauty. And look how morning once more flirts with the east.

Dancing with Reality

He dreams of galaxies. She dreams of fairy tales. It is good so. Things do not change, they just become more eloquent. She keeps dancing with reality. It is often drunk and stumbles, and it is arrogant. Arrogance is of course far more attractive than modesty, though she is allergic to it.She is not sure which of them is wearing the sequins as they dance. Like many women, she is a mosaic of moments, dreaming of a perfect world in which she gets attention but not too much. She didn’t want to be held responsible for evil and still had to find ways of paying for her bread, so she became a servant. Sometimes she regrets it when she finds herself climbing and climbing while she is supposed to pretend that this isn’t even a mountain. She has become a successful hunter who gets what she wants only to find out it isn’t what she wants at all. She thought it was going to be different, and now she is responsible for her prey. Conflict keeps winning, as it so often does. Boys run around in comic book violence. She remains scared of spiders and men’s displeasure. Spiders are easier to deal with; she can remove them. She keeps dancing as though none of this matters, as though great dreams have chosen her with a nod.

Kitsilano Beach

The rain has stopped drumming on stone. This is the time the musicians come out with their own drums, with guitars. A young man sings behind his open hat: “I have a dream. I have a dream.” She believes him, one of eight billion dreamers with eight billion relentless dreams. Back in ancient Egypt, the wealthy dreamt they could purchase immortality. In the Middle Ages, sinners dreamt they could buy pardons. She drops a handful of coins into the singer’s hat. He has long hair and wears earrings, spikes on an armband, and heavy silver chains around his neck. A motorcycle helmet and a bunch of artificial daisies lie at his feet. He nods without interrupting his song. She too once wanted to look dangerous, but she was always either too young or too old. The truth is expensive, but she likes it very much and will take it at almost any price. She braces herself against the wind and walks on to stand closer to the water.

The Seven Ravens:
Notes on the Fairytale

Once upon a time
a princess found her brothers
had been turned into ravens because
her father, the king, wanted a girl
and at her Christening one of the boys
made a mistake. So the king cursed
them all to live as ravens evermore.

Of course once she found out,
the girl immediately set out
to save them. The journey took her
as far as the sun and the moon
and some especially helpful stars.
She cut off her little finger when
she noticed she had lost the key
to the glass mountain door
where her raven brothers lived
under the glass ceiling.
Her little finger did the trick, 
unlocked the mountain, reunited
her with her brothers and unraveled
the careless curse.

Interesting, though, if seven girls
were cursed because of one son,
it wouldn’t even be noticed.
It happens all the time.

Sleeping Beauty – excerpts


There was another optimist at last, the last
prince, a sort of tarot deck fool, too
young a soul to know much death, too
innocent to carry sword and greed or lust.
Some old shepherd warned him: Don’t
go near her! Female beauty is a curse
to men, and plenty like you have
died, hanging miserably in the thorns,
food for ravens. He probably whispered
ominous words such as vagina dentata,
emasculation, vampire witch, sorceress,
she’ll feed on your blood and worse,
your soul, young prince, she’ll cause
your guts to rot with feminine
contamination. I suspect the reason
why this prince didn’t dash home
shrieking with terror was he didn’t
understand the fancy maledictions,
for, it is told, he didn’t
care for anything except her legendary
beauty. One thing he must have
done right was he must have walked
toward the roses gently.
They behaved like flowers. For him
they simply bent away to let him in,
and after him they closed again,
with the intelligence of matter
that doesn’t turn into a curse unless
it meets with violation. Other than that
extraordinary taming of the roses
he didn’t do much. He kissed her.
Who wouldn’t have? Some
say it was all a matter of timing.
Her allotted time of sleep was up.
Certainly he wasn’t necessary. But he
was there, and that’s nice.

The Dragon’s Tale

.
Yes, I took the princess away.
She’s hidden up in the mountains.
She’s hidden from your strange
world of corsets and obedience
among the yellow flowers.
She’s hidden from your male
fantasies among my cousins,
the lithe lizards. She’s hidden
from your benevolent contempt
in the moss of morning dew.
You thought I was going to eat her?