In the last days she breathed confidences,

upturned herself, pouring out secrets and stories

into these receptive shells. She called me her rock-

and laughed until the bitterest drops

scorched her cheeks now fading and pallid,  

rouge and lipstick applied in coarse patches;  

curling her limbs round an ivory palace,

nostalgic already for cinders and ashes

and cursing The Fairy Godmother.

“Yes, it’s quite something that trick with the pumpkins,

reptiles and rodents to coach and foot servants,”

but the midnight mutation remained unforgiven.  

“If she’d been acquainted with ways of the ancients

and counted day’s ending from when the sun’s risen,

not held to some fixture that man has appointed

that Prince and myself would have taken occasion

to become more intimately adjoined,

uncovered our conjugal mismatch in time

and stalled the slippery withdrawal and flight.”  

You will quote me on this, for you are of that kind,

“Charm works but a short spell before losing its shine.”

Foreseeing the descent into pantomime

she threw it all up for a headlong decline.