Rosemary Nissen-Wade #18: The Stories of My Life

The Stories of My Life

My life was the fairy-tales

I was brought up on.

Child on a magical island

apart from the ordinary world.

Our vast back lawn

edged with flowering shrubs,

raspberries and loganberries,

a stand of skinny bamboo,

and a clump of curly ferns

with new leaves unrolling like fractals.

Invisible friends, called imaginary

by grownups who couldn't see.

(Now I know them as nature spirits

and children who had died. Both

liked to come and play with me.)

Sometimes I climbed trees.

Sometimes I thought of myself

as D'Artagnan or Robin Hood.

Cast out into the world to find my way,

bereft of fortune, stripped of privilege. 

Trials and monsters: the mean girls

in the school playground, bullies

who, when I broke away and ran

crying to the teacher, said: 'But we

were just having fun. We thought

she was enjoying the game.'

The real-life wicked stepmother

who tried to feed my little brother and me

mouldy vegetables, bits of broken glass.

(We weren't quite that stupid.) 

Who took the party dress my mother gave me –

pale blue organdie – and sold it for charity.  

The previously wonderful father

who failed to see, and disbelieved.

Rescue!  The house of our aunt,

my own fairy godmother. Her big smile,

her warm, welcoming arms, her wise advice.

The student years. The city. Long nights

writing essays. Study, study, study, 

no money. But - the opening world of the mind.

Shared houses. Jobs. Town Hall dances.

Various charming princes. I chose the one

who turned back into a toad. Party giver,

winer and diner, prize-winning ballroom dancer;

compulsive gambler, pathological liar, heavy drinker, 

prone to black depressions, impotent.

This princess then rescued herself

by means of a full-scale nervous breakdown,

and an adulterous affair. Change of script,

from children's fairy tales to steamy romance. 

The happy ever after was with someone new,

for whom I ditched both husband and lover.

It lasted for 27 years of travels, adventures,

wealth and bankruptcy, while three sons

grew to manhood. Then we ran out

of things in common. Endings. New 

beginnings. Third-time-lucky husband.

The move to a small town in a warm climate.

Happy ever after again, for 20 years, until

it was his time to go. 'Don't leave me!'

I used to beg, and in some ways he hasn't.
I'm always talking to him.

The Book of the Dead holds many

names and recollections. All the parents,

loved and otherwise. All the husbands. 

(They were all loved; not all viable.) 

Some friends. Two of the dearest lovers....

The Book of Life has begun a new chapter,

still being written. I don't yet know the plot, 

or even the outline, but I suspect 

it will be a mystical quest, a saga 

of spiritual adventures, a journey for one.

I have my boots and my sword,
my magic wand, and my light.

Abandoning the attempt to do a series of memoir poems; trying to sum it all up more-or-less metaphorically in one, instead. But this still leaves out a heap of stuff. It's been a longish, eventful life; I think it demands prose. Meanwhile all these long pieces might eventually become a number of shorter poems.