suburban faery (unfinished)

Do giants find the world of Faerie trivial
dollhouse-twee, all pastel let's-pretend?
Their eyes too high-air-buffeted to see
tender eyestalks or close-curled damp shells--
all they know is the crunch of anonymous
dull brown stones and twigs, 
all shapes the same breaking
beneath thick soles...

October glamours even the pocket lawn
behind our tidy house
Centered in the clipped brown yard, a fairytale tree
holds out handsful of heartshaped, gilded leaves
and in its branches a feathered princeling sings
warbles of spells and loss and splendid-tragic things
I can no longer hear
(It is years now since i lost my fairytale ears,
I have crushed too many toiling ants)

Its dropped sticks become swords, and wands;
its squirrels bring messages, brave tasks and tests

And the brown skink, fingerlong shadow
on the lattice,
perched in each eternity
before he spies, twitches, slithers, disappears--
he is an ancient, wise, dragoneyed thing

Cruel hunters with diamond wings
hover and dive
for morsels that creep and scuttle through brown grass

Geneva is hoarding acorns,
fistfuls of acorns,
piling them into the secret box under her tricycle seat
Is she storing up fairy seeds
smooth around so many wishes to wish--
Or nuts of gold, to bribe a bigeyed princess with--
Or maybe she wants only to treasure them,
that heap of treepromises
roundbellied with intention toward the earth--
It is enough: it is Fall, and there are these acorns
glossy brown in her cupped hands