Cinderella, As Told by Birds
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I wrote this poem years ago now, and it first appeared in The Cincinnati Review (thank you!). This poem was on my mind today while thinking about myths, legends, and fairytales, so I thought I would share it with you all. I’m not sure how it will appear on screen, but this is a prose poem (paragraph format), and I wrote it after reading the original story and having the reaction most of us experience: “We’re definitely not in Disney anymore!”
Most importantly, I hope you had a great holiday and are doing well.
Cinderella, As Told by Birds
by Chuck Rybak
Pity did not draw us to her, did not call us to soothe the pale creature. It was the hazel tree. Fresh tree. Tear-grown tree. Born from great loss. Mother loss. The fruit stunned.
Its strange taste unvoiced us on the branches. Hardship salt. Grief salt. We'd never gorged on strife so seasoned. Grateful, we picked her lentils from the ashes. From her
cinderbed. We reaped two more bowls in the stroke of a breeze and cared not that she cried. She scrubbed and bled and wailed while her straw sisters laughed from the stairs. While her mock mother stood stern. More tears. More fruit. More hazlenut that bettered hazlenut. Yet, this creature compelled us to honor her, to garnish her with
dresses. Threads culled from silver catkins. Gold catkins. Living nest. As we strung her into song we saddened with the loss of tears, the return to familiar fruit. But like the
hazel tree, a miracle sprang from our gloom. The hazel tree, whose fruit grows on a fresh branch, away from the fertilized flower, taught us to look outward. We found new fare. Envy plump. Ambition wet. Jealousy's veined tang. We ate the eyeballs. Ripe. One from each sister. A left. A right. Bottomless taste. Spiced with greed. We told none of our kind, returned, and took the remaining eye from each sister. A right. A left. We flew to our maiden's shoulders for rest. We thanked her for stories that end well.
As a rule, I am philosophically opposed to the notion that there is some category or genre of writing that can be credibly identified as "prose poetry." I don't mind contradiction (cf. Whitman's famous declaration) and I'm a fan of paradox, but I draw the line at "prose poetry" and haughtily deny its very existence (I will spare you my usual intemperate screed about this subject. You're welcome). That being said, I was impressed by this "poem" which strikes me as an elegant piece of writing. Well done, DA, well done.
I take your point because I, too, have read prose that strikes me as being far more "poetic" than some free verse which seems to have only one identifiable poetical element, the one you've identified: line breaks. But then, "poetic" also becomes my stumbling block. What exactly do I mean by "more poetic," anyway? Were someone to ask me to point out specific poetic moments or words or phrases or techniques that transformed the prose into poetry, how would I answer? Mumble something about music? Suggest that the writing somehow exuded an elevated sensibility? Other? That's what's bothered me about all the definitions of prose poetry I've ever encountered: they all rely on invoking some ineffable poetic essence to be found in this poetical prose, and any explanation inevitably seems to be, ultimately, entirely subjective. Given the difficulty of providing something concrete to hang a definition on (I mean, e.g., one person's music is another person's dissonance) here's my "conversely": I've come to believe that the only thing poetry has that other writing does not is (wait for it) line breaks. Poetry is "measured language" and measure can be established in a number of ways, though I would argue all measurement eventually results in a line of some sort. (Yes, the lines can be "hidden" or disguised, but if what we're reading is poetry, some type of measurement is involved.) Oh please, critics of this position will say, you are such an ignorant old man. You're talking about "verse" and while almost all poetry relies on verse, not all verse is automatically poetry, you simplistic fool, you. (This scolding would be accompanied by a lot of indulgent, pity-filled head-shaking indicating I was a sad, deluded, possibly pathetic specimen.) But when I ask these critics to enlighten me as to what qualities make some verse poetry, I get the same subjective blather used to identify prose poetry as poetry. Sublime music, elevated expression, etc. etc. So, again, we're left with a situation where one person's poem would be another person's "just verse"--and how are we to decide who is right? For my critics, poetry is being used as a term of judgement not description or definition. Only the best verse qualifies as poetry, they claim, but who decides what is necessary to determine that "best-ness"? What standards (that could be "objectively" agreed upon) will be used to judge the poetic and the lead (okay, yeah, I'm straining a bit with that last image). This use of the term poetry to delineate some type of excellence makes me also ask the question: Okay, then what constitutes "bad poetry"? If it's bad, doesn't that mean it isn't poetry in the first place? So to avoid these problems, to bypass the unholy marriage of judgement and definition, I've decided that, yes, all verse is poetry (and vice versa, ha ha) and that what needs to be done, then, is to come up with some other way of determining quality other than simply saying, oh, well, this is poetry and this is not, as if the designation itself is sufficient to indicate the relative goodness or badness of the writing in question. Have I been able to come up with the means to judge the quality of poetry? Of course not: that's freakin' hard work and probably above my pay grade. Likely, I'd simply fall back on the subjective baloney everyone else uses, but I'd be doing so for the purposes of discussing the success or failure of the writing, not as the means of identifying that writing's genre or identify. But in conclusion, and getting back to the original point of this comment, this is why I deny prose poetry's existence: whatever else it may contain that suggests the poetical, it lacks an identifiable system of measurement: it has no line breaks. QED.