Translucent Mary, Meticulous Fairy

Translucent Mary, meticulous fairy, allergic to dairy,

who fretted whenever she saw the least traces of dust

or of lint, and has shown on a slew of occasions how

ready to faint she is when she makes even the barest

acquaintance with even a slight hint of mint, who ruled

her obedient retinue never to let more than one or two

unshaven faces debase her head-on or peripheral view,

and by far most distressingly cannot abide any bath tub in 
which she had bathed (all bruised and scathed her skin)

from pricey rare porcelain to the reliable gold-covered lead

to which she had been specially led by her mother’s great

grandfather Curlus the Red who sells furniture he’s smuggled

late in the night from the old-moneyed newly-deceased

and displays in his store called “The Rich and the Dead”

who was said, though erroneously, Mary soon came to think,

by their sprawling appalling relations, to understand

how to assuage such acutely demanding and delicate fine

bents of mind by which Mary the fairy was always defined.

But Curlus could never avail her, kept failing her; then as he

felt himself sink toward the brink of deciding to drink as the only

solution to contrary Mary, he stumbled upon an encumbrance

hid deep in a heap on a side street: a four-footed planter

whose lumpy and free-wheeling ugliness somehow seeped

right through her shield of derision to something so risible,

Mary eruptively laughed, and she never had laughed, and she

couldn’t stop laughing, and there was no end to her laughter,

no afterward to the hilarity which now abounded, resounded

until, maybe three hours later, her retinue watched her come to:

that is, come to a sudden enlightenment in which she only

knew this: she yearned for a bushel of sprigs of fresh mint

rolled in dust and in lint she could chew on, delivered by

seventeen unshaven studs, while she bathed in the suds

of the milk bath she now has construed in the well of the four-

footed planter, which now and forever we’re sure will enchant her.

The moral for which is we haven’t a clue. Except why does

that terrible fairy hit pay dirt, while I don’t and neither do you?

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