It was always there in the story–the danger in the ubiquitous needles, things of ordinary use taken to deadly ends, the beautiful sleeper, unaware that her respiratory response is the key, the lifeboat, the signal-light, wake up,
Breathe
Or if you cannot, make sure to find a prince who
can wake you
back to life
The call costs five cents a minute and you have to be ready with a form of payment. On the other end of the line there is
A princess stuck in a well
Bears curled in around a wee-sleepy home invader
A girl in a badly blended family with a knack for the most inconvenient footwear
And all the rest of us-
sleeping beauties, garden-of-Gethsemane-tired
Of hearing about
This impending crucifixion.
The previous night mother had attempted to make tea. Tea then coffee, that was the plan. In the little pre-packaged pouches provided by hotel concessions.
Upon inspection mother noted two nay, three things:
Advancing, almost marine rust on the warming plate
Water in the well from some previous occupant of the room
No heat, no perk
So she reported it to the desk clerk, all the while noting the following-
A previous hotel encounter wherein a woman of rapidly advancing years has chided the desk clerk for a similarly broken coffee maker.
And the likelihood that somewhere, somehow, the night shift clerk possessed a hog, of the Harley-Davidson, not Charlotte’s Web variety.
He said they were all out of fresh coffee makers.
He said he would transmit her request for a new one to the day guy.
Who ended up being a woman of short stature.
Who said she would fetch a tall person to fetch a new one from a high shelf.
This leaving mother to picture the places in the hotel with high shelves and coffee makers
…as she returned to her room.
And talked to her lovely and prepossessing daughter approximately thus:
I was surprised you did not come to breakfast.
Well, in truth, it was because I knew you would bring back the good stuff.
I wanted you to come down because there was a family next to us. Grandparents, a dad discussing his absent son who was allowed to drive down on the highway.
He described the process the way you might describe throwing a child into deep water in order to swim–“eventually he stopped weaving and wobbling”-which of course makes one wonder about when he was “weaving and wobbling.”
Then the father called his son to breakfast-whisp of a boy with hair like a tornado-whoosh!
Knock on the door.
Daughter opens it to a young man, tall, dark, and handsome, like a prince in a fairy tale, only coffee maker instead of glass slipper.
He proffers the box, offers to install it. Mother says she can manage, not realizing that he is a prince, the door is a portal and that all along the coffee makers had carefully conspired to bring these two together.
they say her dress
obscured her face when they found her in the river
he as young as his eventual wife would be
when she went from girl to muse
muse is a tricky thing, Child
who never was a pipe
I inventory both the cause and the cure for addiction
The need, the proper remedy, the clouds white amidst blue in the cup of your head
Chose a different slumber
Not opioid, not heroin, not poison in the fruit or spindle, not locked in a room, not guarded by dragon
Medicinal sleep
Antiseptic reset, white coats, gently beeping monitors
Let the girl rest
Let her own dreams fell the dragon
So that when the spell is broken
The clouds and sky will spill out over her
Beautiful, fragile babies
You always used to say I was not
Your “real mom”
And I say,
“Tropes!”
What you really need to study are tropes.
For instance–
all the insinuating places
Fairy godmothers turn up:
(…Or in your case just your own lost-girl soul)
The forever, the divine, the set-free, the
Real girl you
Should recognize in the faces now of your own
Bewildered children.
(Wake up, sleeping beauty…wake up)
gone too long
A litany of good-byes
Signifying everything
We want from Light
The shapes of letters resemble
Hands raised in supplication
Bottomless things
Somewhere in between I find you
In the story you beg me not to tell
Even though you are the hero of it
The boy who quietly
Saves the headstrong girl
From so many foolish choices
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