REAL PRINCESSES KISS FROGS

                                               

 

                                                I

 

            His ring came home packaged as hazardous waste.

                                    On a good day,

            he read Descartes and wondered if we were real,

                                    my destructive husband.

            But if he loved to hurt his wife for fun,

                                    is now all one.

            And if he judged by his contempt for others,

                                    no longer matters.

 

            Even a brisk, modern sort of undoing,

            forbidding wails of protest at the injustice

            of it all, may purify, exalt

            to martyrdom the waxy figure, carved

            and recarved, fitted with sterile, plastic parts.

            So modern schoolmarms speak of dying children,

            “He has had his trip to Disneyland.”

 

            Some experimental funding paid,

            and finally, of course, the coverage,

            invoked to render out the last bit

            of goody from the hapless case.  (Admitted,

            all martyrdom must be expedient

            to the torturer, a deer to the hunter

            chasing his childhood dreams a week a year.)

 

            So he rose again as Everyman,

            without peculiar faults, relieved utterly

            of personal responsibility,

            invested with the wishes of the consolers,

            a shape to be colored in with their own dolors.

 

 

                                                II

 

                        “Male and female created He them.”

                        We remained, but the Garden has darkened:

                        as rumors spread from empty caves

                                    on the Dead Sea

                                    to my Celtic people

                        that Eve’s rebellious appetite

                        for knowledge authored her subjection,

                                    her husband’s discontent,

                                    and the knowing thought of death.

 

                        Assumption of guilt is the price we pay

                        for our illusion of control,

                        as nature and morality

                        fall weeping in each other’s arms.

 

                        “All flesh is grass,” the Hebrew preacher

                                    gallantly proposed.

                        “But Eden means our suffering

                                    is wrong, and sacrifice

                        required to put it right,” breathes soul,

                                    willfully unwise.

 

 

                                                III

 

                        Hermitage and sacrifice,

                        the basic drives we call upon,

                        our backs to the wall, can placate gods

                        and men and even keep the goblins

                                    on the dark side of the window.

 

            “Je vis comme si,” confessed a bitter scholar,

            who saw at last he gave himself away

            to live with alien tribes whose faith in magic

                                    he could hardly share.

            And if our sister hadn’t died at Aulis,

                                    Troy and all the heroes

                                    had turned to arts of peace.

 

                                                IV

 

                        I still prefer the sail to the landing,

                        for everyone the same ending.

                                    All Moses got was a glimpse,

                                    and that of a barren place.

                        All rising’s by a winding way;

                                    the switchbacks are essential.

 

                        So Eden’s twilight was our dawn.

                        To know we know sets us apart

                        from other beasts who put each other

                        on the plate like the innocent bear,

            take a chicken like the forthright fox.

                        But knowingly to waste, to spoil,

                        whether the means is a bomb or a lie,

                        is doing evil since our rise

            to grace from mindless life in paradise.

 

 

                                                V

 

                        Our pets have not the beautiful

                                    and dangerous gift of tongues.

                        Mea culpa, I have loved

                                    my horses and my hounds

                                    more than my violent husband.

 

                        (Yah, yah, your Torah was likely

                        written by a Hittite woman!

            That truth’s for putting me out in the cold hall

            while you celebrated Friday with your father.)

 

 

                                                VI

 

            A married woman is a colonized city,

                                    a land under the Romans.

            “Render unto Caesar,” and “the meek

            shall inherit,” not Caesar’s sons:

            the desperate faith of slave and proper woman.

 

            A martyr’s victory of silent stillness,

            who never lost because we never strove,

            were never wrong because we never spoke,

            smacks of sour grapes (Aesop’s or

            the Bible’s, take your pick.)  And what is more,

            to win belief in the impossible

            may gain control of the believer’s soul.

 

            So the more unlikely side of the story,

                                    opposed to what we know,

            always becomes established orthodoxy:

transubstantiation, metamorphosis.

 

            So marriage goes in the Land of Litotes,

            believing way too much in the power of a kiss.