Hansel and Gretel

I went walking with a new, final boy in the woods, where the animals ....  In that push and pull, moss and bark, — that myth, which even the therapist later couldn’t unravel, — antlers entangled, and we owed each other.  First, logic scraped and shoved on the tile floor to cast him as brother, the cousin, a friend.  But there were no words, only scores of movies running as one, the sigh of an eternity of chair-arms, and the clap of black-eyed Susans.  Two clowns, an awful pair, clasped together for months in a white cow named Marriage.  My broken swizzle-sticks and his one red ear.  Did I ever imagine my back would be this tired?  So that, even when, like vagabonds in clogs, sitting down to bread and grapes by the river, we stumbled onto the saffron ground of touch, of beds, woke to air that was grace, even then —

Now, we share an emotional cottage where it is always morning.  His shoulders hang white in prairie shirts, purposeful, and from the window upstairs, I catch the old witch out playing in the fields.

So, this is my proposal to you, who left only footprints in the snow two years ago:  Want to be our fire-keeper, our bear-dog on the rug?  Want some of the gingerbread?  It’s black ink on paper, and the wolves eat it from our hands.

(published in The Hawai'i Review)