The 1002nd Night

Snow White and Rose Red e bear at the door, begging to be beaten free of his snowy coat, was a king's son under a curse, detail my sister and I learned long after we scoured him with brooms and then lay down, pale crescents pinned to his vast dark. Rose claimed that in firelight his fur glittered but I saw no more than before, when a coin warmed in my hand pressed a queen's profile into the ice coiled in fronds against the window. In the eye­size opening melted tear by cool tear, had I seen something break from the forest's deep ranks? I saw nothing beyond an animal knowing— if it be knowing—what a lost hunter does: on such a night any warmth will do. So in the heart of a wood a man will sleep inside the beast he's slain, waiting daybreak to illumine the way toward any clearing. Toward a cottage like the one where red roses and white clambered to the window, the sanguine and the snowflake's distant kin spendthrift with promise of good company as they vied for my sister's shears. In a cut­glass vase too fine for the rough table on which lay bread and books for two, a bouquet would hold its salon while as always we rudely, mutely read— Rose, someone's travels bound in red morocco; I, botany of the season ahead where naked meant without specialized scales and tender, not enduring winter, the author looking out for those after his own heart—If it is too cold to read in the field, save this for the warmth of home. Shadows unroll across the bluing snow but enough oblique light has pierced a man­made pond gracing the palace grounds that, out of a slow internal melting, ice crystals regrow into bloom and thorn as men harvest them, sawing the water into frozen bales, loading sledges tomorrow will drag to the icehouse. The tree overlooking this—is it weeping? Not markedly weeping. Are the leaf scars solitary? There are two or more at each node. The bear, that long lost night? He was one of two brothers. One picked Rose to wed, the one who had been animal chose me. Wind rattles a fist of milkweed until it's prized open, loosing a handful of tufted halfpennies one by one, that each be borne far off and root where it falls. ...