TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

For many of us, fairy tales give us our first set of archetypes. In the Disneyfied versions I remember watching on television — Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty — there was clear good and clear evil, and good always won in the end. Happiness isn’t just offered in the present but promised in the future, as the characters who are pure of heart live “happily ever after.”

But of course, the Disney versions of fairy tales don’t reflect the gray areas of real life, and they don’t even reflect the traditional versions of these stories. When I was old enough, I found my way to the collected Brothers Grimm, but even then I wasn’t quite old enough for the violence I found inside. Cinderella’s sisters butchered their own feet to try to fit into the glass slipper! That bloody plot detail certainly wasn’t in the Disney movie with the cute mice and birds who made Cinderella a dress from fabric scraps.

Today’s poem conjures that dark, fantastical world of fairy tales.

Black Fairy Tale
by Elizabeth Spires

Who were you that day you left your parents
standing on the platform, waving black handkerchiefs
—How young they were then!—
and you waving back, you with money in your pocket and your grin,
as the train began to move, first slowly, then slowly
speeding up, the whitewashed houses of that village
falling flatly back into the past
as you sped forward into a morning stilled by fog,
by enchantment, dreaming of a woman
bending over you, pouring milk into a glass, 
whispering, Drink this, Drink this.

So many years have passed!
You wake to the noon sun burning a hard black outline 
around the fallow fields, the shimmering trees and houses,
shadows doubled into themselves, hiding,
the train speeding faster, ever faster,
birds on the wires, black birds, 
marking off milestones, chuckling to themselves.
Smiles, gestures, currency, the few words
your parents taught you, like love, farewell,  and courage,
are useless now, you’re crossing unfamiliar borders
quickly, much too quickly, your death and birth connected,
as the crow flies, by a straight line on a map
although you never wanted, did you, a journey as simple as that.

For one-ten thousandth of a second
you stall at midpoint, caught between twin cities, 
twin infinities, just long enough to glimpse
the past’s pale child beckoning from the black edge of the forest.
Return, you must return, by following the black fairy tale,
the one your parents kept from you,
locked in the black book in the back of the closet. 
Bits of bread, fluttering rags snagged on hedges,
will show you the way if you look, if you look. 
Who must you save? Shadows are showing themselves,
touching this thing and that with their shadowy spells,
a fat red sun is disappearing as you enter
the clearing where the empty cottage stands,
its door swinging on hinges that sing, What use, What use.
Nobody’s there, nobody that is
except a crow, hunched in a tree,
its feathers black as coal and shining, eyeballing you,
each eye as empty as the barrel of a gun, 
making a click, click, click,
now that you’ve arrived.

"Black Fairy Tale" by Elizabeth Spires from ANNONCIADE © 1989 Elizabeth Spires. Used by permission of the poet.