When Sleeping Beauty wakes up
she is almost fifty years old.
Time to start planning her retirement cottage.
The Prince in sneakers stands thwacking
his squash racquet. He plays
three nights a week at his club,
it gets the heart action up.
What he wants in the cottage
is a sauna and an extra-firm Beauty-
rest mattress, which she sees as an exquisite
sarcasm directed against her long slumber.
Was it her fault he took so long
to hack his way through the brambles?
Why didn’t he carry a chainsaw
like any sensible woodsman?
Why, for that matter, should any
twentieth-century woman
have to lie down at the prick of
a spindle etcetera etcetera
and he is stung to reply
in kind and soon they are at it.
If only they could go back to
the simplest beginnings. She
remembers especially a snapshot
of herself in a checked gingham outfit.
He is wearing his Navy dress whites.
She remembers the illicit weekend
in El Paso, twenty years before
illicit weekends came out of the closet.
Just before Hiroshima
just before Nagasaki
they nervously straddled the border
he an ensign on a forged three-day pass
she a technical virgin from Boston.
What he remembers is vaster:
something about his whole future
compressed to a stolen weekend.
He was to be shipped out tomorrow
for the massive land intervention.
He was to have stormed Japan.
Then, merely thinking of dying
gave him a noble erection.
Now, thanatopsis is calmer,
the first ripe berry on the stem,
a loss leader luring his greedy
hands deeper into the thicket
than he has ever been.
Deeper than he cares to be.
At the sight of the castle, however,
he recovers his wits and backtracks
meanwhile picking. Soon his bucket
is heavier etcetera than ever
and he is older etcetera
and still no spell has been recast
back at Planned Acres Cottage.
Each day he goes forth to gather
small fruits. Each evening she stands
over the stewpot skimming
the acid foam from the jam
expecting to work things out
awaiting, you might say, a unicorn
her head stuffed full of old notions
and the slotted spoon in her hand.
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