Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms
limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit
world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the
time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as
inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She's on a
voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a
salmon,
struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
Little doll
child,
come here to Papa.
Sit on my knee.
I have kisses for
the back of your neck.
A penny for your thoughts, Princess.
I
will hunt them like an emerald.
Once
a king had a
christening
for his daughter Briar Rose
and because he had
only twelve gold plates
he asked only twelve fairies
to the
grand event.
The thirteenth fairy,
her fingers as long and
thing as straws,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes,
her uterus an
empty teacup,
arrived with an evil gift.
She made this
prophecy:
The princess shall prick herself
on a spinning
wheel in her fifteenth year
and then fall down
dead.
Kaputt!
The court fell silent.
The king looked
like Munch's Scream
Fairies' prophecies,
in times
like those,
held water.
However the twelfth fairy
had a
certain kind of eraser
and thus she mitigated the
curse
changing that death
into a hundred-year
sleep.
The king ordered every spinning wheel
exterminated
and exorcised.
Briar Rose grew to be a goddess
and each
night the king
bit the hem of her gown
to keep her
safe.
He fastened the moon up
with a safety pin
to give
her perpetual light
He forced every male in the court
to
scour his tongue with Bab-o
lest they poison the air she dwelt
in.
Thus she dwelt in his odor.
Rank as
honeysuckle.
On her fifteenth birthday
she pricked her
finger
on a charred spinning wheel
and the clocks
stopped.
Yes indeed. She went to sleep.
The king and queen
went to sleep,
the courtiers, the flies on the wall.
The
fire in the hearth grew still
and the roast meat stopped
crackling.
The trees turned into metal
and the dog became
china.
They all lay in a trance,
each a catatonic
stuck
in a time machine.
Even the frogs were zombies.
Only a bunch
of briar roses grew
forming a great wall of tacks
around the
castle.
Many princes
tried to get through the
brambles
for they had heard much of Briar Rose
but they had not
scoured their tongues
so they were held by the thorns
and thus
were crucified.
In due time
a hundred years passed
and a
prince got through.
The briars parted as if for Moses
and the
prince found the tableau intact.
He kissed Briar Rose
and she
woke up crying:
Daddy! Daddy!
Presto! She's out of
prison!
She married the prince
and all went well
except for
the fear --
the fear of sleep.
Briar Rose
was an
insomniac...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the
court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the
prince's presence.
If if is to come, she said,
sleep must take
me unawares
while I am laughing or dancing
so that I do not know
that brutal place
where I lie down with cattle prods,
the hole
in my cheek open.
Further, I must not dream
for when I do I see
the table set
and a faltering crone at my place,
her eyes burnt
by cigarettes
as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.
I must
not sleep
for while I'm asleep I'm ninety
and think I'm
dying.
Death rattles in my throat
like a marble.
I wear
tubes like earrings.
I lie as still as a bar of iron.
You can
stick a needle
through my kneecap and I won't flinch.
I'm all
shot up with Novocain.
This trance girl
is yours to do
with.
You could lay her in a grave,
an awful package,
and
shovel dirt on her face
and she'd never call back: Hello
there!
But if you kissed her on the mouth
her eyes would spring
open
and she'd call out: Daddy! Daddy!
Presto!
She's out of
prison.
There was a theft.
That much I am told.
I was
abandoned.
That much I know.
I was forced backward.
I was
forced forward.
I was passed hand to hand
like a bowl of
fruit.
Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I
am.
Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the
prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my
bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon
me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little
girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help --
this life
after death?