Parables and Portraits

CINDERELLA

Cinderella, the soul, sits among the ashes. She is depressed, as usual. Look at her: dressed in rags, face smeared with grime, oily hair, barefoot. How will anyone ever see her for who she is? A sad state of affairs.

Winter afternoons, in a corner of the kitchen, she has long conversations with her fairy godmother, over a cup of tea. The fairy godmother has, accidentally on purpose, misplaced her magic wand. In any case, these transformations are only temporary. The beautiful spangled gown, the crystal slippers, the coach and footmen -- all would have disappeared at the stroke of midnight. And then what?

It is like the man in the mirror, says the fairy godmother. No one can pull him out but himself.

ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE

Ready, set at their respective starting places, staring into the distance between the parallel white lines, they seem like an old married couple about to run through the same argument for the millionth time. Achilles is tense inside his huge golden muscles. The tortoise blinks.

Afterward, they shower; then walk, side by side, to a neighborhood caf�.

"It's the damnedest thing," says Achilles. "The more I catch up, the more reality slows down. Until it's no longer even a film. Every time: we finish, immobilized, in a single frame."

"With me a micro-meter ahead," the tortoise adds, sighing. He takes another bite of his lettuce sandwich; chews for a while, meditatively; blinks.

"Maybe if I tried something different," Achilles says. "Maybe a new pair of shoes."

DR. JOHNSON

Something I left behind
calls me back to your time-zone,
when the son of man spoke Latin,
tucked lace in his collar, and upon
his brachycephalic dome
an equilateral velvet
hat was perched, like a dove.
Through the great marble hallways
of the British Museum, the ghost
of Descartes wandered, bemused.

If I were to find you now,
it could not be in the light.
You would have no chandeliers blazing,
no circle of friends around you
as, steadily, immensely, you poured
the distillates of your Tory
wisdom into their ears.
What, Sir, remains when the body,
one-eyed and scrofulous,
which lurched through the streets as in fetters
and rode horses like a balloon --
what remains what that body
casts off its cumbrous frame?
When all the splendid distinctions,
the intricate structures of right
and wrong, the golden yardsticks,
the algebras of dismay
vanish, you are left alone
with the sense of infinite vastness
that a child awakens to, blissful
or terrified, in the dead of night.

Perhaps you're prepared to stay there.

Or perhaps, out of the fond
and unassuaged depths of your spirit,
an image, like a flower blooming
in fast-motion, begins to form,
the vision of a shapely leg,
the sweet cavern between two thighs.
And soon it is, yes, a world:
of consonants pullulating
and innocent flute-voiced vowels;
soon there are nests of quartos,
folios flap through the air
like homing geese, and the towers
and bridges of a city loom up
in the gray foreground. Those crowds --
are they heading into the Strand?
Those gentlemen in wigs and waistcoats --
are they bound for The Cheshire Cheese?

All right, Sir: let us begin
again. You are in the courtyard
of some country alehouse, fidgeting
in a coach of white and gold.
The driver (can you see?) is a dachshund.
The team are four brown mice.
Don't be impatient. Take out
your handkerchief. Blow your nose.
We'll be leaving in a moment. London
is no farther off than a sigh.