poem22 Mar 2021 05:50 pm
White as Sorrow, Black as Gone
Sandi Leibowitz
< Night and the forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair. Angela Carter Even his eyes have been eaten. I remember him the way he used to be, foreign presence entering our cottage changing everything, the Bear since swallowed by the prince. I didn’t want his brother, naïve duke in silver hose and adequate broad shoulders. Be happy, Rose said, beaming, her wish also command; we can stay together forever just as Mama said. Don’t think I covet my sister’s husband, the prince with his amiable grin full of blunt white teeth. But Bear, oh Bear, what I would give to feel those ivory fangs slide slick against my shoulders. Rose says his fur was brown but it was the black of loam to which arboreal dynasties deeded their thousands of leaves, black as the night that waited beyond our fire-lit hearth, breathing just outside the cottage door. He wore the secret scent of the woods, whiff of danger and decay, savagery of owl, sacrifice of dove. Bear’s eyes gleamed more gold than flame’s play on brass kettle or bee darting through the dark paths of the hive, the subtle soul alive. How could I guess it was not imprisoned prince but Bear himself I glimpsed there? Oh Bear, you have purged the wild within you, the greenwood gone as if you’d torched the brush. That’s not even a ghost of you, the man cloaked in ermine pelt who rules these marble halls beside Red Rose, his placid queen. Cultivated gardens surround us, and fields tended by peasants who scrape and smile when we ride through, barricaded within our tidy carriage. The woods are miles away. Now if I would taste the night, I have only my own heart to visit.
