the bone daughter

1.
First,
I must correct you:
I was first your wet-nurse,
then your stepmother.
Your father fell in love with me, he said,
when he saw me with you at my breast.

Milkdaughter, sweetdaughter, featherdaughter.
In a time of grief, you were a light.

2.
You had not two stepsisters but three.
My third daughter was the reason you had milk to suck.
She died along with my first husband of a fever
and your father was kind enough to marry a woman
who had borne no sons, only daughters.

3.
Ungrateful daughters are wasps' nests murmuring hatred
a writhing ball of snakes in the gut
a boil on a parson's cheek.

Of course I killed the cow.
You said it was your mother
and you would not milk it.
I shuddered when I saw its thighbone in your bed,
wrapped in blankets.

You never looked at me like you looked at the cow.

4.
My two daughters did not lead a life of leisure,
though you called them your spiteful highnesses.
But they bathed. Mended their clothes. Combed their hair.
And they did not smell as you did, musky like wild things
hair tangled as the wood.

I did not know until you sprouted breasts what I had given suck to,
what my husband's wife had been.

5.
He would lie in bed next to me nights,
call her name in his sleep,
his voice an ache of guilt.
She was in all of his dreams,
and all of his nightmares.

The memory of her long body lay wordless between us.
He could not rise unless it was to thoughts of her.

6.
You asked to go to the ball but I knew
that you would bring shame on us.
Disobedient child! Dressed in a rattling shirt
of ribs, skirt of uncured cowhide, sun-bleached vertebrae your belt.
Tangled hair, smelling of sex, you tumbled into the crowd.

I knew it was you, and my heart wailed.

You made sure of him and then ran away, fleetfoot, barefoot.
There was never any slipper. There did not need to be.

7.
He came to our doorstep, called for the girls,
my blushing virgin girls. "She was a daughter of this house.
I mean to find out which one she was."

I never cut them, but there was blood
as the prince sheathed himself in them to see which fit.
Both too small.
Both too dry.
You were a slippery fountain, and because of you
your sisters bled.

He roared and blustered until we found you.
Shameless, naked, you tackled him in the courtyard,
mud on your feet and leaves in your hair.

Four, I wanted to tell the prince.
I had four daughters.

8.
The prince, after the ceremony, starved to death
because you told him you would sustain him with your love.
I heard that you were laughing at his funeral, having taken
what you desired, great with child, avoiding your mother's fate.

I grow old in another country now, my daughters married,
my husband left behind in the place where his first wife
greenwife woodwife streamwife skywife
met her end at his own two hands.

There is a pack of wolves in these woods.
When I smell them, I think of you,
my wolfdaughter, my greendaughter, my bonedaughter.