The Princess And The Goblins

(1)

From fabrication springs the spiral stair

up which the wakeful princess climbs to find

the source of blanching light that conjured her

to leave her bed of fever and ascend

a visionary ladder toward the moon

whose holy blue anoints her injured hand.

With finger bandaged where the waspish pin

flew from the intricate embroidery

and stung according to the witch's plan,

she mounts through malice of the needle's eye,

trailing her scrupulously simple gown

along bright asterisks by milky way.

Colonnades of angels nod her in

where ancient, infinite, and beautiful,

her legendary godmother leans down,

spinning a single stubborn thread of wool

which all the artful wizards cannot crimp

to keep the young girl from her crowning goal.

Initiated by the lunar lamp,

kindling her within a steepled flame,

the princess hears the thunder and the pomp

of squadrons underground abducting him

who is the destination of the cord

now bound around her wrist till she redeem

this miner's boy from goblin bodyguard.

(2)

Guided only by the tug and twitch

of that mercurial strand, the girl goes down

the darkening stair, undoes the palace latch

and slips unseen past watchmen on the lawn

dozing around their silvered sentry box.

Across the frosted grass she marks the sheen

of thread conducting her to the worn tracks

made by miners up the mountainside

among the jagged mazes of the rocks.

Laboring on the tilt of that steep grade

behind which the declining moon has set,

she recalls queer stories her nurse read

about a goblin raid on miner's hut

because new excavations came too near

the chambers where their fiendish queen would sit.

Hearing a weird cackle from afar,

she clutches at the talismanic cord

and confronts a cairn of iron ore.

Suddenly a brazen song is heard

from the pragmatic boy confined within,

gaily cursing the whole goblin horde.

Inviolate in the circle of that skein,

looping like faith about her bleeding feet,

the princess frees the miner, stone by stone,

and leads him home to be her chosen knight.

(3)

The princess coaxes the incredulous boy

through candid kitchens in the rising sun

to seek the staircase by the glare of day.

Hand in hand, they scale meridian,

clambering up the creaking heights of heat

until she hears the twittering machine

which quaintly wove the fabric of her fate

behind the zodiac on attic door

with abracadabra from the alphabet.

Pointing toward the spindle's cryptic whir,

she tells the greenhorn miner to bow down

and honor the great goddess of the air

suspended aloft within her planet-shine.

Laughing aloud, the dazzled boy demands

why he should kneel before a silly scene

where pigeons promenade the gable-ends

and coo quadrilles about the blighted core

in a batch of raveled apple rinds.

At his words, the indignant godmother

vanishes in a labyrinth of hay

while sunlight winds its yarn upon the floor.

O never again will the extravagant straw

knit up a gilded fable for the child

who weeps before the desolate tableau

of clockwork that makes the royal blood run cold.