Proposing to Dickens
Sally Rosen Kindred
[Little Red Riding Hood] was my first love. I felt that if I could have married
Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.
Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Tree
I want to be your Little Red.
I want to meet you in a wood.
We both know you were a flea-weak husband.
I don’t want your hearthstone, your whining ring, spoon
unfolding the thick Christmas pudding
in the same cellar basin where I’d need
to stir the children’s wash.
No dusk. No prone spoon.
Instead, our bodies tall between alders
(their thin leaves shaking like ghosts) and yours
in fur’s smoke fury, asking
which path I’ll take.
I want to find you in a bloodied blue dress,
grandmother, triumph-lined cheeks, saying Guess
what? and The better to feed you with!—
slinging for me your knife’s wild story, a full bowl
of wolf stew.
I want to wait in my red child-
hood, wine-dark
as a closed book—
wait wolf-belly hard
for you to come with an axe,
blade eighteen chapters wide
to cut me out
of that mistaken house
as you did when I was twelve:
your Copperfield, wired on a shilling’s worth
of whelks and pippins, lifting me away
from the mother spooned down
on the black den couch
and into the noon grit of your market streets—Southwerk
to Blackfriars, Hungerford Stairs—your mouth’s dirty light
telling me
through, in sickness
and in hood, till death do us bread-
in-the-basket, death do us
teeth, my huntsman, my
alder, my Charles: your words,
my wolf,
first bliss.