​Ever After
To Noemi

The beginning was all a puzzlement:
the small mouth in the sand, its dark trickle,
pain she wanted to run from and couldn't,
then a fiery thistle of fingers
pointed or waggled or beckoned or prodded
or said, Pay attention! Her eyes, bright-new,
were coin for that: she kept still and looked
 — however hard to know what was a sign
or just a self idling beside the road
and did it mean her, whoever she was.
Still, she went on, getting the knack of it,
and little by large everything opened up,
the signs leading onward to other signs,
the riddles rearing in her path like stiles,
too high to jump but easy to slip under;
and misplaced whatever had to be found
again, and followed every misdirection
until it came true, and ran needless errands
so whatever else had to happen could,
so the white horse who came to her in the wood
would come to her saddled and carrying
a king, and believed unbelievable witches
and little wizards her body sensed were kin,
and by subtle experiment and profound
meditation discovered her powers
and the power of her prince-making kiss,
too extraordinary almost to use.
And so it was so, after all — and all
that often-diverting foolery had led
somehow to a state figured in the stars:
every night she saw a kingdom go to sleep,
and, gleaming shoe buckle to sparkling
diadem, rose and possessed the heavens.

And saw, from the height of her life, she had lived
a story, had, as though enchanted, obeyed
the dumb talk gesturing in her limbs, while she
 — her passionate hunger for mysteries
nothing that merely happened could sate — 
had wagered herself against everything,
demanding always, "And now? What happens now?"
And now? And now she was telling the story,
an old woman talking to children.
Words came to her, so perfectly at the pace
of things they seemed not to move at all — and now
the odd details of her journey grew lucid,
the wilderness, at home in itself, made sense.
And telling it again made the same sense
again, made it deeper, gave it pleasure,
the water came up in the bucket clearer,
from a cooler, stiller depth of the well,
and where the bucket knocked the wellcurb
the wood buffed itself clean on the stone,
until her life lay clear in the grain.
She touched it, beautiful, neutral, itself.
"Ever after" was really the afterlife
where she would be telling her life over.
No longer checked, exhorted, driven
in an agony of forwardness,
the fierce horse walks over the tranquil plain,
bobbing its nose in an oaken pail.
The children reach down to pat its flanks.
She is happy. So.
                  And once again
let herself drop until no bigger than
a pale thimble in the deep, but bountiful
and great when she brought the darkness up
on her lips, potable and clear and filling,
and touched them so to the children's lips;
and, gleaming shoe buckle to sparkling
diadem, rose and by all ways at once
kicked free and scattered across the heavens.