Theodora Goss: Poems

Tam Lin Remembers the Fairy Queen
by Theodora Goss

She had eyes like apple seeds.

A small, angular face that reminded me
of a fox’s mask. Was it a mask she wore
the whole time I was with her?

The thing about fairies is, they’re not like us,
material. Indeed, they most resemble
assemblages constructed from our dreams.
Their visible forms are for our benefit.

Sometimes, as we lay together in bed
under a canopy of spider silk,
I would turn and find she had become a tree,
branches for arms, a bird’s nest between her legs,
with three blue, speckled eggs. Were they our children?
I’d blink, and she would be a woman again,
yawning and stretching as human women do.
She’d smile at me with a fox’s sly, wise smile
as though she had tricked me.

The castle was sometimes made of rough gray stone
covered with moss, sometimes of murky water
with fish swimming in the walls. When we danced, the music
came from viols or the buzz of a hundred bees.
I sat on chairs that were either toadstools or clouds,
and ate from plates that stared back up at me,
blinking iridescent eyes. What did I eat there?
Air? Insects? Salads of delicate herbs?
The bread tasted like ashes.

Sometimes she loved me, and we would ride together
on robins, or was it flowering hawthorn branches
whose thorns would prick my legs through leather trousers?
With her strange retinue: the fairy knights
riding on weasels, the goblin standard-bearers
holding thistle spears. They were always half something else,
with the heads of toads or owls, a bat’s black wings.
Everything there was always half something else,
except the fairy women, wholly themselves,
and so luminous you had to look at them
through tinted spectacles. It was the fashion
to sew living butterflies to their shoulders,
so they moved in a halo of colored dust
and panicked flapping.
Awkwardly, at the rear of the procession,
walked a stray cat she had turned into a boy,
who mewed and tried to scratch me.

I was mostly unhappy, but sometimes happy. The problem
is this: I would rather be unhappy in fairyland
than happy elsewhere.

At night, I lie beside a woman who never
turns into a tree, who bears me human children.
And all I can think of is her hard black eyes,
which sometimes looked at me with such disdain,
her small red mouth that never told me the truth
and laughed when I believed her.
That fox’s face, which was probably always a mask.

Sometimes I go into the forest alone
and whisper into the hollow knot of an oak:
I’d rather spend an hour in fairyland
than a lifetime elsewhere.
Then I stand in the green silence, with only the cries
of birds, the shush of the oak leaves high above,
and wonder if she’s listening.

(The illustration is In Fairyland by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.)

Green Man
by Theodora Goss

Come to me out of the forest, man of leaves,
whose arms are branches, whose legs are twin trunks,
rough bark covered with lichen. Come and take
my hands in yours, and lead me in this dance:

In spring, green buds will sprout upon your head;
in summer they will lengthen into leaves.
Oak man, willow man, linden man, which are you?
In autumn, they will fall, and through the winter
you will be bare, with only clumps of snow
or birds upon your branches.

Come and love me,
my man of leaves, my forest man. For you,
I’ll be an alder woman, birch woman.
In spring I’ll wear pink blossoms like the cherry;
in summer ripening fruit will bend my boughs;
in autumn I will bear, distributing
a hundred seeds, our children. And the birds
will sing my praises. Let us learn to love
the sun and wind together; let us twine
our bodies, filled with sap, until we make
a single tree on which two different kinds
of leaves are growing, where birds build their nests,
among whose roots the squirrels hide their nuts,
storing them for winter.

A hundred years from now, we will still stand,
crooked perhaps, the sap running more slowly,
our two hearts beating, separately and together,
under the summer skies, in autumn rains.

(The illustration is by Arthur Rackham.)

The Purple Iris
by Theodora Goss

There was one purple iris in a bed
where many would be blooming in two weeks,
and I thought, what made you come out so early?
Did you hear birds and think, it’s summer now,
time to get started? But it’s only May.
You should have waited until June, when all
your brothers would be blooming, purple, lilac,
yellow — heraldic, looking very French.
Or was it an interior impulse, rather
than something external to yourself? Whatever
there is in irises of soul or mind
telling you — now. Now is the time to open.

I suppose we all have something in us like that,
a sense, an intuition, telling us
now. Open yourself to wind and weather,
put on your purple velvet fringed with yellow,
fulfill your purpose, whether late or early,
even if it’s only May and winter’s chill
still lingers, though the garden is filled with birdsong.
Even if you’re the only iris blooming
in that particular bed.

(The painting is The Iris by Vincent Van Gogh.)

One of Those Days
by Theodora Goss

It is one of those days when I feel completely out of step
with the world, when I am convinced
I should be somewhere different . . .

Walking through a forest of tall trees, preferably maples
because it is autumn, and their leaves would create
a carpet, maybe even a path
of red and yellow. And I could follow it,
in the belief that I was going somewhere.

What has happened to my life?

My moments are measured by clocks,
not by the chirping of crickets, or the call
of birds in the underbrush at the edge of the forest,
not by the movements of water
as it falls over rocks into a pool.
Not by the sun sinking lower.
Although I know, I can feel, that it is all
falling: the leaves, the sun,
the running water into the still water.
And then the birds and crickets falling silent.

I can feel it even though in my efficient life
where the clocks are marking time,
all the minutes are the same: one after another,
in equal intervals. Still, outside my window,
behind the reflected electric lights,
slowly darkness comes,

like a benediction. And I feel
once again, that I was born elsewhere
and have, still, elsewhere to go . . .
where beneath tall trees, slowly the leaves
and evening are falling together.

(The painting is Woman at a Bureau by William Smith Anderson.)

The Gray Catbird
by Theodora Goss

The gray catbird, says Birds of Massachusetts,
is secretive: yesterday I saw it hiding
behind the leaves. I could never get a photo.
I stood and watched it in the sunlit forest,
wondering what it was, this slate-gray bird
with a black cap, as though it belonged to some order
of nuns, with small black eyes, a long, thin bill,
looking at me through the leaves as if to say
some things don’t belong to you, some things belong
only to themselves. Later I read the Chippewa
call it Bird that Cries with Grief. I wish it had cried;
I would have liked to hear it, not grieving of course,
but just to hear the sound, like a cat, which is why
we call it catbird. Instead I stood on a carpet
of marsh marigolds, looking for twenty minutes
under the trees with my camera, trying to capture
it on film, while it insisted on remaining silent
and secretive in the heart of the sunlit forest,
always hidden among the leafy branches,
always a little beyond my understanding.
As it remains, despite my identification
of its habitat, its migratory habits,
its Latin name.

(The image is Catbird on Virginia Creeper by Isaac Sprague.)

The Mermaid’s Lament
by Theodora Goss

They are there, they are still there:
eyes eaten long ago, replaced by coral
and therefore more beautiful, transformed.
Jaws grinning as though at a fine jest.
Their ribs, like the ribs of the ship itself, become
homes for small fish, eels, and squid, more welcoming
than in life. Only their bones
remain, furred green with sea moss,
and the rings on their fingers, looser perhaps
than they once were,
and the green floating hair.

They are there, still there, alas,
lying on beds of algae
under the dark wave:
all the loves I could not save.

(The illustration is by Arthur Rackham.)

My Ghosts
by Theodora Goss

Some days, I think I’ll die of loneliness
here in this room. And then the ghosts appear,
Depression hiding in her long black hair,
Anxiety, a puppet on a string
pulled by a force he cannot understand,
Insomnia, so pale and tired-eyed.
I say, “Come in, my ghosts. I was alone
but now have company.” And down we sit,
Anxiety perched on the ottoman,
chewing his fingernails, Depression flung
over the sofa cushions, her black hair
piling upon the carpet, and her twin
Insomnia curled into my best chair.
Can I be lonely when they come, my ghosts?

(The image is by Wladyslaw Theodor Benda.)