In 9th grade English, we had a fairy tale project.
My hero was the youngest of three princesses.
Unlike her sisters, she wasn’t especially smart, or strong, or beautiful.
She only knew how to look and wait.
The plain-looking, unremarkable princess found an egg one day,
by the banks of the stream where she used to go for long hours,
to breathe in wonder while she sat.
There was no nest nearby, as far as she could tell.
There was nothing so striking about the egg.
It was small and brown and plain—larger than a quail’s,
slightly smaller than those of the palace hens.
She picked it up, wrapped it in a handkerchief,
and walked it back, carefully cupped in her open hands.
She kept it warm, and it grew—into what, I can’t remember.
But it wasn’t a bird or a lizard or any of the predictable
reptilian-amphibian-avian creatures that come out of eggs.
It was beautiful when it hatched.
And what it revealed at the end was the power of her waiting gentleness,
so far removed from other attributes.
Since then, I’ve sometimes questioned if there might be
some pathology behind this sort of thinking—
but I was raised on fairy tales,
Hollywood rom coms,
and a worn copy of The Lives of the Saints.
So, it’s likely impossible for me to discern
with any reliable level of objectivity.
When it came to imagining the thing inside him
that was more or less invisible much of the time,
I liked to picture it as something almost too fragile
for survival in the wider world—
like an egg outside a nest,
or the tiny flame of a birthday candle.
Easy enough to snuff out,
but it’s all you need, really,
to start a blaze hot enough to roast a pig,
or scorch a hillside. Or to smelt iron—
which was the better metaphor, as far as I was concerned.
I’ve always been partial to the idea of love
and patience as shaping forces,
when applied with a deft hand.
“Dreams are like that,” I would tell the students.
I thought about calling them mine sometimes,
but in their lives they were their own selves—
which simply were, with or without
any influence I might or might not have
prayed toward or against, in weaker moments.
This is why you’ve got to keep watch all the time—
against wind, infection, suffocation.
They are always dying, losing face,
forgetting what they are
until they are nothing but trace whispers of light
in place of something that used to burn
a liquid dance.
Round with promise
like a wet pear.
