Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Around The Fairytale's Gemstoned Page

[to my Grandmother, Lucy W. Young, my Grandfather Milton B. Young and to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, among others...thank you! and thanks are due to God since as a friend once said, "God gives us the fairytales to show us the way home... "(P.S. To my mother too, of course. Mary Adalyn Young-Douglas, who spoke in syllables of strawberry and utter cream all the time. really.), my charming sister too, daughter of music, Sharon)

around the fairytale's gem-stoned page are sun splattered leaves and berries softening the borders ferny angels lightly penciled in beyond the trees that shift like pedaled dreams 


on the dream piano of the pale blue country lined with gold I pray to someday rescue if I can- pure swans down drifts down these elaborate Capitals on every sunset's page the 


swans revert to children and are saved on the one rock left in the water coloured whirlpools of their sea- and I skip backwards to a small green house with spearmint strip-ed 


awnings or a pink- beige brick with picture windows and mimosa trees... you can't fade away along the borders flushed with glaced roses I won't let you- and every time 


i close my eyes the skies are pleated with your swans the ruby candlestick in Beauty's room drips very lime-green wax all over my small table with the circus scenes. maybe 


for childhood's jam-spooned days, alone, they gathered all those startling coronations, words of best green velvet, I don't know how else the carriage came to be cut from the 


creamy rind of citrus afternoons as if with the golden scissors of a King Hans Christian Andersen it's still me wavering in a pink embroidered dress and golden slippers, 


wobbling near the icy angels with their candle spun whispering as they say: rework the hidden brocades now of all lost feelings, places, courtiers, things- in snowy silence 


heaped with silver lilies...shine... I can't break faith with the fairytale task till vaster kingdoms come and my sister's perfect Chopin bubble clears the pink-white-red azaleaed 


fence while the clouds keep billowing out beneath their clothespins the milk makes butter islands in the oatmeal until- the last sweet early peas are sorted satisfactorily 


from the Milky Way and kept in the stoppered bottle on our etagere, the one the colour of ashes of roses... but will they turn to diamonds in the end or chicken pie you may well 


wonder when the curtains close... Grandmother's playing Liebestraum again in her rose taffeta on a rose taffeta staff she turned to diamond music in the end taking my 


Grandfather's arm and heading upward without her pearl opera glasses but with the Psalms all double scored in moonlight... the day winds down like antique toys in soft 


yellow chenille- the jeweled heart sifts in the furnace the tin soldier cannot reach the tabletop... someday I will learn to live expecting better swans and in your name I'll find the 


lemon latitudes so fine of the summers everywhere now- of the hidden mermaids with a sainted love dissolving into foam... 


mary angela douglas 5 april 2011