Boy Raised by Wolves, and: The Girl Without Hands, and: Sleeping Beauty

Abstract

Boy Raised by Wolves Not the pack's socialized carnage or yowls Of mercy in the wild child's gut wrenching story, But North 10th Street, a boy crouched against a dog On the kitchen's stained tiles, his packed bag In the hands of the caseworker there to save him By rending him away. It's a lick in the face That comes closest to fostering love Not the system's forest of bureaucracy Or the door slam of his late mother's sister Back from cleaning up other people's messes In hotels to smoke in her robe at the blinds Furiously high. It's her gimpy stray Of just as humble pedigree, a bitch, As she's called without contempt, who smelled trouble, Crept off the torn couch as when the muscled Boyfriend returned ten seconds after leaving For his stash, her ears down, her forbearing eyes more [End Page 84] Human than sentient, Samuel Johnson's dog Of despair which Goya painted in a last Nameless mural, yearning from a sickly Brown pinnacle of earth, the whole world The chain that holds her back. If this boy drew On his blank cracked plaster he'd get what he gets Anyway too many nights according to the state. Her he won't, a trifle of sticks and bones He'll outgrow into a mean, aloof maturity. But right now they're fused together, adhere Like paint and wall, peering over the brink At the rest of their days, no instinct for how The worst happens for good reason. Housebroken, Dumbly loyal, she lets him have his brief Handful of fur, lets him bury his head In her side, in that primitive mood, grief. The Girl Without Hands Living is so endless, a fairy tale Bluntly cuts away the surplus, leaving Just the odd detail, the stingy bone. Who knows What story she tells to explain herself That night he finds her eating in his orchard Like a child bobbing for apples, a tall axe Of a man just like her father when he stood Over her in that dark room of his house, Of a world she can't grasp, only behold? Stories manipulate, change everything. But she has nothing to lose, the hands Like a lady's elegant white gloves [End Page 85] Already misplaced. Of course he wants her Though she's cold and pale to the touch, her whole Body a stump, a voice remote from its words. He gives her hands of silver, his upon her However gentle just compensation, Precious metal, the clumsiest compassion Compared with what she must feel. But the son She bears by the name of Sorrowful Brims with her own blood, no prosthesis growing Out of her. Only then do her born with hands Return like fruit, love an extremity Like a lizard's tail or the legs of a starfish Mindless in its shallow glittering pool. The boy maims her again into beauty; Becomes her tenuous appendage, gone The numbness, palpable the memory of sensation, What she feared most, the phantom pain And hellish pleasure. She's healed or so The story says, writing off the devil Who plagued her for no reason other Than her purity. Then the man blunders in The secret cottage and takes her in his arms, Undoes her blouse because oh God, he's missed her; The burden at last lifted but not really. Sleeping Beauty Six months on the street, she's one long swoon Into loathsomeness, soiled jeans jacket, bits Of city park sycamore leaves, a touch Of forest embellishing her hair, no milk [End Page 86] Carton runaway, booze the none too magic But just as toxic curse, half a fifth in one Dared swig, her companions yelling, slapping her face. And the hero? He jogs in the same grass But another world, has a sales meeting In an hour, never his ambition to happen...