The Wedding Letter

There's something you don't know about me yet,

and as it separates the charm of lost

innocence from guilt, it is something you

ought to know. When we escaped, when we had

witched the witch and come back to the stone town

and learned to wear shoes and tell the hour right

on the tower clock, the burghers' sharp hearts

were in their throats if we were rolling hoops,

you and I, in the cobbled streets. I think

the city fathers dreamed the witch's tricks

had passed to us like a bad cold. The fools.

Practical men, they accounted us some

insurance against the costlier forms

of chaos. The candyhouse in the woods,

they knew, in part is a house in a child's

head. They were beginning to be a race

much kidnapped from, a country for the old

to quarrel for, and so were glad of us,

who rid the world of the magic able

to barter the soul for a ginger snap.

But something else was eating them. We might

get fickle, splash their wives and eldest sons

with warts. To them, a quest was a bargain

that taught you cheaply not to hope next time

that the deep trees beyond the town grow thin

and clear at the gate of a good story.

A moral with no teeth, having been made

to mythologize the bloody fortune

of those few who left us for the wide world

and stayed away and were, notwithstanding

morals, who we wished to be. We didn't

appear relieved, you see. It was a blow

to pedagogy and the harder path

of forks and briars. When you come within

an inch of being battered into cakes

and whipped like cream, you should get religion.

The reason I am writing at such length

is to arm you, Gretel. Tonight, as it's

the last before you marry, is the end

of you and me. But go over to them

out of our sleep and slow roses prepared.

They kill their kind, they die like flies, and love

to sing of it, though why they will not say.

They fruit a tart of what they were and throw

a feast to rid them of themselves, then thrill

to the clean, unhungry past they have just

invented, where they will all go soft. Soon

the swords, the swells of pleasure and the gold,

the brave gray stones pelted at the dragon

lie in their custard hearts. Yet to hear them

tell it, they were born realists and not

young and all wrong. Marry. I don't care. But

there is the matter of my gift, which I

am getting to, my yarn, my thread of seeds

to take us back, my way out.

What a witch

to happen on. Because her secret wish,

to be a girl, was out of her control,

she ate the lost like vitamins, and sinned

as a child sins, with the mouth, the body

not yet real enough to be a weapon.

Why is a witch, if she is open-mouthed,

omnivorous and rich, all skin and bones?

Because what she eats eats her up. Sorrow,

whose stomach is just the size of its eyes,

stands like a broom in her corner. Not to

be lonely, she might have loved us if we

had had a foreign policy and said:

"Our crazy mother threw us in the woods

because of bread. Now we want to settle

in a kingdom made of sugar. You seem

to need an army, with a house this rare.

Compromise. For protection from the poor

and hungry who locust the land, you would

keep us in cookies. We won't want any

mothering, having had our fill of what

the belly does to love."

Murder, of course,

is more your sort of sweet. Fast in a cage

and fattened on taffy, I watched you plot

and execute your first crime of passion.

And death, while it is less diplomatic,

has the advantage of pointed fingers.

The nuns never asked which of us jetted

the gas, assuming I saved you. And then,

coming home is cushioned by a cliché

as well: all is forgiven, have a slice

of bright berry pie, the past doesn't hurt

unless you let it.

But you let it. Why?

You shouldered the oven door like an armed

bandit, and the witch drummed her boots on it,

sizzled and wailed, swore to reform, offered

to cook the moon for you. You were as cool

as a firing squad. And when she was done,

the world stirred in its sleep and threw her off.

Her house, it seemed, was a ring of long lost

children, and it fell like a botched soufflé.

The boys and girls were the mortar and bricks,

and they cracked up like a jigsaw puzzle

of gingerbread men, and off they went, whole.

The gumdrops in their faces were their eyes

again. This done, they had no nightmares left.

"Good girl," the forest called, "not guilty. Make

this girl a general."

I can see you,

stealing a look at the clockwork cottage

chiming on your mantle. What do you think

being a wife will change? Our first kisses

smacked of ice cream. Maple and vanilla

hung in the air of our sad nursery.

From the first we had a taste for the strange,

biding its time at the edge of the day's

regular appetites. Call it a set

of defenses for murders yet to come

to light. And tonight, more unspeakable

than our secrets is the telling of them.

I went again. (Did you guess what it was,

that it would be this that has made of me

a continuous boy, leading a kite

like the town idiot, on a Sunday

flying it by the church while the town prayed,

slow as a planet?) Back to the break in

the spellbound woods, the tulip trees pulling

the bells of their green hours, the chimney crooked

like a finger in the field, and no sign

that a fat house was thought of there in which

the young would hide from time. Only her great

engine of an oven, cool now under

my fingers, had survived the undone trick

of the building. In its belly, on its ashes,

I would take naps while you went off to court

your dancing master. Whatever we were

left alone to practice, I would put down

to get back to my dream, run to the dear

iron room the witch fired her castle in.

And when, one winter day, I brought in hay

to make a bed and saw how I was home,

there came a knocking on the oven door.

It was she.

But changed. As young as you

and dressed like a fairy. She had made me

a pastry shaped like a sundial. At each

stroke of an hour, a wave of icing held

a cherry and chopped nuts. A ginger boy

in a chocolate boat was anchored there,

the shadow of his sail telling the time.

The candle in her other hand, she said,

after the pain would leave me free of life

with things to do in a straight town, seeing

they are fatal. I would not have to be

a piece of gingerbread. No one would know

from the look of me that I no longer

was involved. And my most secret mission

would be-Did you guess?-to follow you.

Poof.

I went up in smoke and woke up a child

forever, far from the rest of you, light

as the paper birds and boxes I hold

high on a string, arrested in the sky.

But I looked like Hansel, and no one knew.

So the past didn't end when you left it,

Gretel, and thus you can't be expected

to be sorry for it. Besides, magic

has other things to be besides a witch.

You weren't that important. That the ice moon

opens again and again is really

no one's fault. It just does. Everyone is

specially scarred by the murder he can't

avoid having on his hands, the killing

by years of one lost child. Go. Go marry

the prince, we want you to. Wear white. The witch,

if anything, is grateful for the push

you gave her into the next mystery.

She speaks of the good luck she plans to rain

on you, who turned her head.

All we ask is

that you get us the ground to bless. Banish

the dwarfs appointed to be your royal

furniture. Make the witch your lady's maid,

and she will sit spinning at the window

singing, filtering like the forest shade

the tribes that travel by, the runaways,

the ambiguous garden retreats of

the prince. And I? A jester, a juggler,

whatever the convention is. We three

will play with power safe in the palace.

Servants will come with trays of fresh candy

and stand as still as tables. If they crack

a smile, they forfeit growing old. Or up,

for that matter.

Finally, a rumor

of a cure breaks. The line to come inside

snakes with the lame and the colorless out

to the oceans. At our door, where we will love

the best enough to save them, being loved

will stop having its root in what mothers

empty us of because they are starving.

The chance to make us what we were, Gretel.

You can gather the vision you loosed once,

the day you sent the children running home

who had lived in a cake like a coffin

and yet, set free, felt hollow. Like a drug,

sugar scalds if once you take it away.

Every town has one. Out of touch, too

fat, thin in the darks of the eye, shy of

machines.

Right now, as you read this, the witch

is climbing the tower steps to your room.

Meanwhile, I will guard all the wild candy

stored in the oven. She will lock me in,

she says, to keep me safe. Are you nervous?

You are going to be surprised how much

it is like a mirror, you and she. Yes,

you and she, she says, have always dreamed of

a reunion. Now, as she reaches you,

the wind is filling with flavors, the long

wait ends, and the crumbs gleam in the clearing.

Close as your shadow now. Now she has you

in her charred arms, oh we will be so young.