“—cows.” You say it with certainty,
remembering the strayed heifers we saw in the woods
behind the house, last month.
“Well, yes, perhaps she saw cows,
but also she saw a house.”
“—a great big house,” you tell me.
“No, a little house, all painted, neat and tidy.”
“A great big house.”
You have the conviction of all two-year-olds.
I wish I had such certitude.
“Ah. Yes. A great big house.
And she went in…”
I remember, as I tell it, that the locks
of Southey’s heroine had silvered with age.
The Old Woman and the Three Bears…
Perhaps they had been golden once, when she was a child.
And now, we are already up to the porridge,
“And it was too—”
“—hot!”
“And it was too—”
“—cold!”
And then it was, we chorus, “just right.”
The porridge is eaten, the baby’s chair is shattered,
Goldilocks goes upstairs, examines beds, and sleeps,
unwisely.
But then the bears return.
Remembering Southey still, I do the voices:
Father Bear’s gruff boom scares you, and you delight in it.
When I was a small child and heard the tale,
if I was anyone I was Baby Bear,
my porridge eaten, and my chair destroyed,
my bed inhabited by some strange girl.
You giggle when I do the baby’s wail,
“Someone’s been eating my porridge, and they’ve eaten it—”
“All up,” you say. A response it is,
Or an amen.
The bears go upstairs hesitantly,
their house now feels desecrated. They realize
what locks are for. They reach the bedroom.
“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.”
And here I hesitate, echoes of old jokes,
soft-core cartoons, crude headlines, in my head.
One day your mouth will curl at that line.
A loss of interest, later, innocence.
Innocence, as if it were a commodity.
“And if I could,” my father wrote to me,
huge as a bear himself, when I was younger,
“I would dower you with experience, without experience,”
and I, in my turn, would pass that on to you.
But we make our own mistakes. We sleep
unwisely.
The repetition echoes down the years.
When your children grow, when your dark locks begin to silver,
when you are an old woman, alone with your three bears,
what will you see? What stories will you tell?
“And then Goldilocks jumped out of the window
and she ran—”
Together, now: “All the way home.”
And then you say, “Again. Again. Again.”
We owe it to each other to tell stories.
These days my sympathy’s with Father Bear.
Before I leave my house I lock the door,
and check each bed and chair on my return.
Again.
Again.
Again.
THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN
She has the dream again that night.
In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you make your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse half of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. She finds herself staring at the horse’s penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.
Flies buzz about the corpses.
The wildflowers tangle in the grass. They bloomed yesterday for the first time in…how long? A hundred years? A thousand? A hundred thousand? She does not know.
All this was snow, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield.
Yesterday, all this was snow. Always winter, and never Christmas.
Her sister tugs her hand, and points. On the brow of the green hill they stand, deep in conversation. The lion is golden, his arms folded behind his back. The witch is dressed all in white. Right now she is shouting at the lion, who is simply listening. The children cannot make out any of their words, not her cold anger, nor the lion’s thrum-deep replies. The witch’s hair is black and shiny, her lips are red.
In her dream she notices these things.
They will finish their conversation soon, the lion and the witch…