by Jane Hayman
SHE DREAMS
She dreams of rooms
numberless, marvelous
bedrooms, ballrooms
rooms lined with silk
a throne room
golden
with hundreds of candles
burning unblinking
here in this castle
where only
the clocks move.
Her father sleeps in the library
as usual over a book.
Her mother, in the solarium,
catches the sun
as lightyears pass
while out in the stable
the chambermaid drowses
forever entwined with the groom.
She dreams of rooms
without doors
or with one wall missing
rooms that bleed
into other rooms
or that spiral suddenly upward
skyward
rooms full of threat
where locks could spring open
unheard
at a breath
or the touch of a finger.
She dreams she is taking a bath
in the forest
in a bathtub shaped like a boat.
Over her head
clouds are developing
purple and green, lemon
and silver and black.
The air is fresh,clear
lighted with flickers
foxfire seen at the edge of the eye.
She knows it will rain
it will storm
that she ought to return to the castle
but she is happy playing in the water.
If the prince comes now
he will find her in this dream
in the beautiful twilight
naked, alone and alive.
HELLO MOTHER
She’s vanished, lost, gone for sixteen years
just bones and shadow now
pitched into the dark beside her son.
Out in New Jersey somewhere I forget.
I never go there so she came to me.
Age sixteen, pretty and not so sweet.
She looked like me, the way I used to look.
(I’m not sixteen anymore
ever again either, Mother.)
Mother, you’re like a plant —you smell of memory.
Arm in arm with your girlfriend
in that photograph,
the two of you are daisies, spicy with youth.
How did you find me? How do you know me?
It’s years before you leave home, before you marry,
years before I am born
and years, certainly years,
before I walk
in back of you into the dark.
GRETEL TELLS ALL
We knew
there was no going home;
we didn’t try.
At night, after they left,
we heard voices:
Your mother is alive.
Your mother wants you.
No directions
no little birds to follow,
only noises in the trees.
There were markers–
twigs like Chinese characters,
leaves waving their flags–
omens.
Every day another sign
we couldn’t read.
We had no maps, just stories
but I had my camera.
We can prove it happened.
When the wind rolled in
that last day,
it smelled of her–
barky, bitter, elemental,
old as dirt.
A whiff, a drift
of ginger.
Crashing the undergrowth
like dogs,
we tracked that
odor;
it grew stronger.
Then finally –surprise!–
there rose before us
suddenly, like the moon,
a house
where there had been
no house before.
That house!
That cabin in the piney woods!
The house they tell about:
the chicken feet, the gingerbread
the talking cat and dog
the yawning gate, the lollypops
the garden growing wishes–
all of it, all there
and just for us!
Abracadabra, open sesame!
The door unfolded
and she sucked us in.
Reader, you know what happened:
how, drugged on bread and milk,
we fell asleep;
how she turned against us in the night;
how she locked my brother in a cage
and made me her servant;
how, just in time,
I pushed her in the fire.
It vanished as we left,
everything –the house,
the pets, the garden–
even her jewels
turning to earth in our hands.
We never got rich;
we merely saved ourselves.
But look, here in this book
it all lives on in pictures.
She loved my camera
and, Reader, it loved her back.
Here she is
feeding my brother,
singing,
posing with the cat,
beautiful again
as she always is in my dreams.
ANOTHER LOOK AT THE FOREST
Back at the palace the childless king and queen have gone to bed.
The servants are drinking and dancing —darkness is sweet in the woods.
Mother, stepmother, witch, bitch who has murdered our father’s soul:
you will turn to smoke; already we are heating the woods.
Breakfast for us in the palace garden —double helpings of bacon,
pancakes, strawberry jam. Swans swim by. Bluebirds peep in the woods.
JANE HAYMAN has returned to writing after a long silence. Past work appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, and many other journals and anthologies. New poems are in the current (Winter) issues of Barrow Street and Margie, The American Journal of Poetry. She has taught first graders to read using poetry by Frost, Williams, Carl Sandburg and Lewis Carroll.