Escape Into Fairy Tale

Imaginary background music/lyrics: “Fairytale,” Sara Bareilles, Little Voice 

I’m not really advocating “escape” into fairy tale here.  Neither is Sandy Longhorn, with her title “There Are No Fairy Godmothers on the Prairie,” a guest blog entry at Escape Into Life. She’s looking closely at fairy tales to see how they function, transformed, in her poetry, and how they always functioned, as cautionary tales often about coming-of-age experiences or handling life’s “dark undertones,” as she puts it.

Or disillusionment, as I see it.

There's an irony. Fairy tales as illusions that record our disillusionment, and then restore us. Yes? Restore our innocence? Make us whole after a terrible fracturing? 

The Grimm versions help make that clearer. Open your eyes. Do not go gentle into that weird forest….

That’s how fairy tales often strike me—as something at once gory & useful, containing the awesome/awful truth that my innocence might be shattered and nothing can help me but magic…or wit and grit. Plus courage in the face of the worst. “Don’t give up,” I learn and relearn from fairy tales…

In this poem, first published in Ekphrasis, I look at a painting titled The Fairy Tale, and imagine the mother telling her daughter a fairy tale, side by side with an autobiographical moment of closeness with my own mother, who left a drunken party (to which wives & children were invited) in mixed patience and disgust.

The Fairy Tale

                                    William Merritt Chase, The Fairy Tale (1892)

The woman and the girl are pink and white confections

on the picnic cloth

in the center of the grassy field.

They wear their necessary layers,

but the fabric is tissue thin,

the parasol laid aside for the thrill of the story.

It is safe here at the seaside, away from the men,

to be so exposed,

the girl’s face all raw color inside the white bonnet.

And in the tale, the prince will hack away at thorns

to offer the princess love

and a kingdom, even as she sleeps her long sleep.

From this far away

both painter and viewer can justify the blur

but I can see more clearly

my mother one summer day,

walking away from the party, sitting at the base of a tree

to wait for it to end.

I use the “it” at the end here with an Emily Dickinson-like looseness and precision, to mean, of course, to wait for the party to end, but also the “fairy tale” of marriage and family life, the long sleep of women who believe in that fairy tale, and perhaps even the tree…for it will take a long, long time for that to end, won’t it?

Alternate background music: “Hard to Be Soft,” by Paula Cole, on the Courage CD

Or Peter Gabriel & Paula Cole singing “Don’t Give Up” here on youtube.  (Or, with Kate Bush on the So album, which has “Sledgehammer” on it, a song I played over and over, wildly dancing….)  

Really, don’t give up!