Once Upon a Time
By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 7/25/08
Like a Giant, whose fall is prolonged by
Some kind of supernatural agency,
The shade of the house and of the western trees
Continues to stretch the darks across the brights,
Reminding us of the assembly of conflicting
Associations that we suppress each day
In the body’s fiery cloister. The sharp
Cries of a thrush in the shattering blooms
Of a tall ligustrum,, the rattle of dry wind
Through dryer foliage, the counterfeit pleasures
Of the yellow east, all these corrupt the doctored
Data on the infallibility of human progress,
And disseminate inscrutable images
Through the grass, where so many tiny
Green snakes keep slipping away.
The boy in the witch’s oven, a grown man, now,
Still holds out the surrogate bone to his blind tormentor,
Struggling to reconfigure the biomedical model
That defines Death as “treatment failure,â€
And not this inevitable languor of the Giant’s
Shadow making phantom beings on the lawn,
And in the tops of trees, gremlins billeting themselves
Right in the midst of our most bucolic moments,
And shrieking, from the very throes of these peaceful
Rustlings: “Next stop: Night!†as they beat
The children through the gate with hangman’s nooses.
A crow has replaced the thrush in a nearer shrub,
His hellion caw cutting an unrestful ramble
Across the sky’s clean blue, and reminding us
That even the massing of trees can be terrible,
However impassive their vegetable lusts.
The witch, eventually, grows tired of being deceived.
The Giant, eventually, terminates his fall.
And when the surrogate is finally rejected, will the boy
Be inside or outside of Paradise? And will the man,
If he is one now, stop offering
His useless bit of bone, accept the prohibitions
Enforced upon him, and elucidate
His fate with honest speech?