“you are my best guess / if i were a gambling man, and i am / you’d be my best bet”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday:

Fairy-tale Logic, A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.


First published in the March 2010 issue of Poetry. Stallings remains the poet my age I most admire. I am struck by how the examples from the octave are all from European folklore, while those of the second are from Greek Mythology (with the last common to both domains).

---L.

Subject quote from Best Guess, Lucy Dacus.

Comments

[rymenhild]

This poem is available as an option for the Poetry Out Loud high school poetry recitation competition and I've definitely had students who chose it. It works extremely well in performance.

[larryhammer]

I believe that, as a performance piece.

[shewhomust]

Ooh! Thanks for the introduction!

[larryhammer]

Glad to. I have all her collections, even the selected poems, though not all her translations.