The Witch of the Inner Wood

by M. Travis Lane

The happiest women, like the happiest nations,

  have no history.

  George Eliot

  1.

  I was a perfect picture then. I breathed

  the summer of perfection. I was five.

  The painter was my papa’s friend.

  We walked in the public gardens every day.

  The fountains made a gentle noise

  like mama’s skirts.

  You can see in the picture: my blue dress,

  the curls they cut off later — she would wind

  them round her finger with the comb.

  There were lilacs and poppies like soft balloons,

  and I, as tender silky as the rose

  that, faded from the opera bouquet,

  lay in its gilt posy rim

  limp as the fish that papa caught

  which leaped a little in the grass

  like rainbows, then grew dim —

  they wilted, bent their rosy heads

  into the basket’s lettuces —

  I shone.

  The fever came.

  The heat came in from the dusty trees

  and soured the whitewashed nursery.

  The white sheets prickled me like briars.

  They cut my papa’s favourite curls and dried

  white towels upon my head. I dreamed,

  and saw the fountains leaping in the park,

  making no noise, and I went to them.

  And in this silent picture I awoke.

  2.

  At sixteen I made my classmates each

  a valentine — a poem, a drawing —

  whimsical, romantic, as

  each one might like, so everyone,

  even the ones who had no friends,

  would get one, unsigned valentine.

  A secret. No one guessed.

  (A quiet girl like me!)

  I didn’t mean them all to guess,

  though Mother thought they ought to have,

  I think it made her angry.

  How she would feel, now,

  that you do not even know my name,

  holding my album in your hand!

  But after all, how could you know?

  You are not kin.

  I took my album south with me

  when I married.

  I didn’t write my friends’ names in,

  though I wrote

  “Dr. Williamson” on Father’s, since it looked

  so stern (he was never stern!)

  and on the little drawing of

  “The beautiful Miss Helen Jones”

  who was my best friend ever —

  It was after the War. Dr. Falligant

  studied homeopathic medicine

  under Father, and he asked for me.

  So handsome, so truly considerate!

  Father said I was too young;

  they could not bear

  to part with me.

  Three months —

  but Father never could say no

  too long, to me. I was

  your great-great-grandfather’s

  first wife. I died

  in giving birth to a dead child.

  He will never have mentioned me.

  I left my album for you, dear.

  (unsigned)

  3.

  I stood straight as a soldier

  when Daddy was

  the Brigadier.

  I sent the Royal War College

  his papers in a shoebox.

  Do you know,

  they never even acknowledged it?

  I think the silly fellows have

  mislaid it.

  But they sent

  me an invitation to their mess.

  The Prince was there.

  He does not hold himself as well

  as Daddy did, but better than

  these men you see upon the streets

  these days, slip-slop.

  When Blackie died

  Daddy would never have another dog.

  We never had cats.

  But if they want to visit me —

  like Tiger. I knew who owned him.

  He’d come in for his tea

  and go out again. When his family

  were all away they’d leave him out

  and he’d come right in

  and sleep all night at the foot of my bed.

  He was a soldier, Tiger.

  He grew old.

  One day a new tom on the block

  came in our yard and fought with him.

  By the time I got a bucket of water out

  to throw over them

  it was too late.

  There were bits of Tiger everywhere.

  I went out this morning for raspberries

  (Daddy loved them so)

  and slipped

  on the porch steps and fell.

  I lay with my face on the gravel path

  and I thought of Tiger,

  dear Tiger.

  It must have been almost a year

  after that terrible, terrible fight.

  I lay with my face on the gravel path,

  and I thought of dear Tiger.

  from

  NIGHT PHYSICS

  FALL-WINTER 1990-1991

  1.

  On the newly dug tulip bed

  the cemetery kitten rolls, its paws

  powdered with soil. Its collar says

  “I am cared for.” Just beyond

  the bulb plot is the monument

  for soldiers killed in action —

  rubble, beneath a scrabble of vines,

  replaced now by a single stone, smooth,

  shiny, and grey as a credit card.

  Some of them never fired their guns.

  How do we know where the devil is?

  For all I know, shinned up that shabby fir tree,

  grey tail jerking against its bark,

  greedy, noisy, half-blind with age.

  This constant talk of war seems like

  the tinfoil pennants a garage

  sets out for new sales (second-hand):

  “Come die for your country somewhere else!”

  all rustle and glitter. Not in

  this tidy garden where the graves

  are calm as a motel carpet when the guest’s

  checked out, the bed made up.

  Think of the mosses on these stones,

  how long they took. That ivy, no short work

  breaking those boulders.

  War kills the future sooner than the past,

  but time takes time.

  We could just wait the devil out.

  Why push?

  2.

  Dry winter. The brown, pale field

  incised by paw and hoof some months ago

  reads like an outdated schedule

  of long-ago departures. At its crest

  a thin pine flares its eagle wing

  green headdress like a warrior’s.

  At its foot the felled kin lie,

  corded and tallied.

  So still, so motionless it seems

  as if the ice-clay earth won’t turn,

  or the long shadows lengthen their pale thatch.

  And yet the east, without a cloud,

  has darkened as I watch. Small things

  may find a respite in the dusk, and I,

  perhaps. Is all this barren beauty

  half a lie? The shaggy marsh,

  with its dismantling ice-panes, nests

  of twigs, and rotting logs

  beyond that empty crescent where the sky

  and this grey highway make a bond,

  still marks a passage, not a past.

  This bare field is no desert.

  And yet the plow may be retoothed,

  the pennants felled, and dragons sown,

  tilled, sown again, a harvest

  of new death.

  3.

  What will console us now?

  Not those teen-talking men

&
nbsp; who eyeball, instead of looking. Who see death, send

  others off to die. Not those machines

  that can’t see people on the ground,

  nor soldiers, honest, ignorant.

  Evil does evil in return.

  What time and commerce could achieve,

  relieving the yearnings of the poor

  for tyrants to make hatreds into strength,

  we will not know.

  Even the devil has somewhat on his side.

  We can’t see straight if we don’t blink,

  pause, wonder, even hesitate.

  Nothing is all that simple.

  Nothing is all that straight.

  4.

  A radar-crested yellow bird hunts me.

  I hide in a glass forest

  crackling with static, electric hail.

  I am lost in a whiteout desert — dunes,

  wind pits, water holes

  where the blue flicker of a breath

  could catch a bird eye —

  let me sink

  into the sand like a beetle, hooded,

  heat-goggled, antennae drawn

  back, floundering —

  the smoke

  drifts toward me, ancient, potent,

  whining.

  Let me hide under a mullein leaf —

  off camera.

  5.

  Young dogs romping in the snow

  with dolphin leap, sky-wag, tar-yellow eyes,

  clear with the noon of innocence,

  naive and handsome —

  How they run and run and whirl about!

  And we will find

  tomorrow, if they’re not leashed in,

  among our small plantation of young spruce,

  the gashed ribs of a pregnant doe, and she

  also leaped lovely, as innocent, naive.

  6.

  A teardrop hangs from the beak of a bird.

  It is never enough.

  What is a true religion! God

  desires no deaths!

  God’s blessing would turn our hands to grass,

  but this black rain

  will rot us where we plant

  without God’s blessing, patience, our rock breasts.

  7.

  Fluish and sick with listening to the news

  I feel as if I were about

  to float away and be nowhere.

  But you, pert corporal Patsy on the screen,

  have done just that.

  I cannot grab you and pull you out —

  and you have turned into a photograph,

  framed, on a table by the couch

  where the afghan is still spread

  to keep your old dog’s hair off the rubbed plush.

  Your sunflower smile will dazzle me years,

  years after the life you did not have

  has grown grey in your mother’s scrapbooks.

  Where had you volunteered to go?

  It was “only a job,” you said. Honey.

  You weren’t “only” to us.

  8.

  When you walked up that stair I lost your sight.

  Your back was erased when they latched the door.

  What should I whisper to myself

  from your cold bedside?

  I can’t believe what you believed, or had to.

  You are coin they notch in a meter, so much time,

  that gone, they spend

  somebody else.

  I have lost your eyes, your nervousness

  in company, your jokes,

  the red mud on your socks.

  Someone was drowning, they threw you in

  weighted with cannon around your neck.

  A game of cards.

  They were gambling.

  9.

  The street is still light, and the windows gleam

  yellow against the snow-blued sky.

  Home-time. The offices will close, the street lights shine out

  stronger, while, indoors,

  hearing my old dog murmur in her sleep

  as if she were afield and young,

  hearing the leaf-fall footsteps of the squirrels,

  I could be so content —

  as if this weather floated without wind

  along a darkening river.

  But

  below the satin polish of the keel

  the kelp heads of drowned soldiers bob.

  The distant shore

  seems lined with haggard refugees whose cold

  untented hands

  could pierce my comfort like ice spears, but

  they are far —

  This boat

  moves on its errands, passive as a dream

  within a dream, as if they were not real,

  those maimed and whispering orphans,

  those beacon-traced fire-arches over their plains.

  Does evil need this evil?

  Life over life folds over like the leaves

  of an unending story in a book

  that no one reads but wind which tears

  and tatters every page.

  The street is still light, though darker, and the bus

  has dropped its last two passengers. Across the way

  the college chapel’s cross has caught

  the first faint dustings of fresh snow.

  We can’t undo what has been done. What now?

  The “other way,” ignored, untried, invisible,

  still waits.

  ANACHRONIC GNAT MUSIC

  The Conventions: Three Kings (Them):

  Groucho

  Chico

  Harpo

  Prince (Him): Pierrot, Peter Pan

  Princess (Her): Pierrette, Wendy

  Poet (Us): Papageno

  Muse (It): Pegasus

  Dog (Dog): Sirius

  Prelude

  The theatre in darkness.

  Stars

  slowly: Venus, Mars, Aldebaran —

  the Milky Way

  mists over the proscenium.

  The staging drifts a little on that flow.

  The constellations we pick out are blurred

  uncertain, fabulous —

  until the moon,

  as local as a street lamp,

  blots them out.

  I:i Analectic Nook Music

  A forest made of paper, or

  a raft set up with potted trees, or

  Huck’s log home (cut lumber on a current). We’re

  bewildered: night, woods, Heraclitean flux.

  The moon’s shrunk to a spotlight, and the faint

  arch of the stars returns, at intervals,

  as if clouds sometimes intervene.

  Untethered on the wobbly stage,

  a pack horse. Seated, the Poet with his corn-

  cob flute, and, standing, the Prince

  (Tom Sawyer acting him) and dog

  (a border collie) and,

  spread out by the prompter’s box,

  the Book.

  The spotlight crowns the Prince. (The Prince,

  perhaps, has chosen to be crowned.)

  Prince: “Poet, awake!

  From the bathetic forests of your mind

  you must invent my glory, my

  solution to the voicelessness of sky.

  I am God’s germ!”

  Poet: “You’re who?”

  Prince: “I’m your construction. I’m your words,

  your definitions, your imprints,

  your homoname.”

  Poet: “A kind of walking thesaurus —

  a monster who begins

  before I write and keeps on

  when I drop the pen.”

  Prince: “Beforehand and behind hand, I’m

  eternal. Poetry’s not passing time

  but keeping it.

  Derry da or derry down. Tick tock.”

  Flute music. The horse (inflated sheet, four sneakers,

  a dubious stability) bobs at the Poet’s shoulder as he pl
ays.

  The dog perks up. The music moves the raft.

  The spotlight turns like an airport’s beam

  and, searching the backdrop, fastens on

  a tiny light —

  zooms in:

  match flame —

  a chicken coop on fire —

  a city through a telescope —

  a comet’s eye

  whose tail, peacocked with irises

  sweeps suburbs, an imperial robe which

  flaring toward the orchestra, surrounds us, fades,

  invisible —

  and leaves the stage, mid-city,

  neoned midnight. Newsprint leaves,

  torn posters, poles instead of trees. A hotel,

  engulfing like a giant’s mouth,

  swallows the stage.

  We are

  mid-lobby. Trees in pots again. Chairs, tables.

  At the back

  three men are playing euchre. (Curls,

  moustaches, long pale overcoats.)

  The dog lifts a leg,

  then settles by the prompter’s box and stares,

  a shepherd’s eye on the Milky Way.

  I:ii Agon Clinic Nut Music

  The Poet deflates the horse, collapses it,

  and folds it into a parcel.

  Poet: “Shall I book us rooms? Page someone?”

  Prince: “The night’s still young. The game’s afoot.

  Et cetera, et cetera.

  When the music falters I must quote.

  What a pen pal you are! Out of ink?”

  Poet: “The system is a little down.”

  Prince: “Well, rev it up.” (He kicks the horse.)

  “A poet ought to be inspired.

  Here is a forest of images” (he waves his hand)

  “among which real ideas move.

  Those men, perhaps, you’ve stationed at the back?”

  Poet: “The realm of the subconscious. The three kings:

  Balthazar, Kaspar, Melchior,

  if you’ll take their word.

  Or Peachum, Lockit, Filch.

  The wise men with their starry gaze,

  they’ll lead you on.

  I’d rather eat.”

  Prince: “How plebian.”

  Poet: “I can’t write on an empty stomach.”

  Prince: “You need a firmer muscle tone.”

  Poet: “I mean I’m ventriloquial.

  Look, go away. Go bother them.

  Go ask them to set you up somehow.

  They know all motives, basic plots.”

  Prince (miffed but willing to act on the suggestion):

  “Gentlemen, a word with you.

  Can you assist

  me and my servant, this belly-brain?”

  The three kings rise in unison: “Good evening.”

  Groucho: “What do you want?”

  Prince: “Meaning. Heroic action. Fame!”

  Poet: “A nominative case. I,

  a common denominator, can only verbalize —

  hotels instead of palaces

  and knaves instead of kings!”

  Prince: “Be serious!”

  (The dog pricks its ears, as if its name were called,