Look, I'll just read a few more.
My voice is starting to disappear.
This is a very strange poem.
It's called, "Beauty and the Beast."
And well, it feels, it reads very much like a dream,
so let's allow it to be a dream for the moment.
Every once in a while, somebody says, "let me in,"
that's in quotes and there's a little girl saying, let me in--
a little four-year-old girl.
Beauty and the Beast.
"Let me in," the four-year-old in printed dress and rubber
boots knocks on the door in the white woods.
A jackrabbit scurries invisibly across the fragile roof
of snow and hides behind the rotted oak.
The coyote, lion, and half-blind dumb wild pig
remain asleep inside.
All this occurred before the dream of a girl
turned into a beast--
the pink scar tensing the mouth in a permanent grin
of aftermath, the one wide open improbable eye.
"But it's only a dream," she cries,
"and couldn't happen to a princess."
Though it was afternoon, I slept.
And whatever takes place in my dream,
I am faultless and a child again.
The mother watches from the window idly watering flowers.
And the large black stubborn dog mounting his mate,
on an endless ladder, for him this is a dream twice yearly
of the maddening odor of bitch into which he strides,
he growls.
"Let me in," says the Princess.
The dream's unlocked teeth plunge into her face--
the face in the window, the face in the dream
ripped half-off like a door from its hinge.
Blood rushing from the bared skull
onto the pure, white dream of snow over which
she trudges crazily home.
"Up horsie, whoa horsie, whoa."
There is no horse, no princess, no beast from fairy tales.
Only a dog dreaming of bullets raining down
like bad weather and a man slamming a car
door at the dreams, and she whispers, "let me in."
And I wake sweating in a room with a strange, one-eyed,
improbable princess by my side.