The Biscuit Joint: Poems

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

5 EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON Friend of my mother comes up at her funeral (my mother’s, not the friend’s) and says my mom once told her that “when David was a baby, he always seemed to be smiling, and I wanted to find out if he smiled all the time or began to smile because he heard me coming, but I never could,” though since I was sans words in those days, I wouldn’t know, either, would I, though it goes without saying that I’d like to have thrown a net over my infant experiences and tamed them so they’d sleep by the fire on a winter’s night, waiting for me to nudge them with a muddy boot and come to life again and bring me out of myself as I sit there like the peasant in a fairy tale my mother used to read to me called “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” which begins with a peasant who has a daughter “so lovely there was no end to her loveliness,” and one evening, while the family is sitting around “busy with this thing and that,” a white bear taps on the window, and when the peasant opens it, says “Good evening to you,” and the man says, “The same to you,” and I was probably surprised, not that the bear spoke, but that the peasant didn’t seem to be dumbstruck at a bear who not only spoke fluent . . . Norwegian, I guess, but was also exceedingly polite, because I was still a child, remember, and hadn’t read John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist and didn’t know that the standards for good fiction included “creation of a vivid and continuous dream, authorial generosity, intellectual and emotional significance, elegance and efficiency, and strangeness”— wait, no, I wouldn’t have been surprised, because everything is normal to a baby since he hasn’t had enough experience to distinguish between the normal and the ab-. So when Henry James was a little boy, a cousin comes to the James house in Albany with the first installment of David Copperfield, and Henry is sent to bed because his mother thinks a reading might not be appropriate for a little fellow, so the cousin 6 begins to read aloud, imitating all the voices, but as she is reading about the cruelty of the Murdstones to young David, sobs of sympathy are heard from a corner of the room, where young Henry has hidden himself and is listening but has snapped under the strain—this from Colm Tóibín’s The Master, a novel yet one that’s well-researched, and therefore the story’s probably true, or at least as true as the fairy tale in which the bear persuades the peasant to give him his daughter, and they go to the bear’s castle, and every night a man, who is really the bear, comes and lies down beside her, and of course she wants to get a look at him, but she drops hot tallow on him from her candle, and he starts up to say now he must marry a princess “with a nose three yards long” who lives in a castle “east of the sun and west of the moon,” and off he goes, but the brave girl hitches a ride on the back of the north wind, and when she reaches the castle, the man or bear is there, though as a prince, whom she can’t wait to see, so some captured Christians tell the prince that they hear a woman at night, trying to wake him. Realizing what’s up, the prince who used to be a bear sets the princess the task of washing the tallow from his shirt, but the spots just get bigger, and then her mother, who is a troll, tries, and then the whole troll family, but when the peasant girl washes the shirt, the spots come out at once, and the old troll woman flies into such a rage she explodes on the spot, and the princess with the long nose after her, and the whole pack of trolls after her, and the prince and peasant girl set the Christians free and take the silver and gold and fly away forever from “the castle that lay east of the sun and west of the moon,” making the story certainly something less than a transcript of...