Fairy tales promise that a kiss will wake you, a mirror will tell you who you are, and a shoe will fit. Dave Bonta's "Epithalamium, with images from the Brothers Grimm" keeps those promises, but only in the most literal, bodily way. An epithalamium is a wedding song, and the poem's three short sections stage three strange unions: a woman and a dog, a woman and her own body's fragile repair, a dead donor's face and a living stranger.
The first section is the hardest to read. A woman has swallowed pills, "eight / little erasers," a phrase that makes overdose sound like an attempt to rub herself out. While she lies unconscious, her golden Lab licks her face, then returns "for another lick," and then "begins / to nibble." The prince's rescuing kiss turns into something animal and innocent at once. The dog isn't cruel, just hungry and attentive, and the poem's flat, observant tone refuses to make him a villain. The closing lines are chilling: "He starts with the lips, / like any faithful lover. / That faint half-smile." The simile borrows the language of romance, and that unreadable half-smile could be the woman's, or the dog's, or only the reader's projection.
The second section turns the Snow White mirror inside out. The woman's only mirror "lies face-down when not in use," as if she can't bear its verdict. The poem suggests she has had some kind of medical repair. Each day she checks "a small flag of skin" the doctors implanted, and "white / or gray would signal / surrender." The word is perfectly chosen, since a flag that signals surrender is a white one. The ritual, "Every day she checks… Every day / when she pulls up / her blouse," gives her life the quiet dread of waiting for bad news. Then the imagery darkens. She feels "some phantom embryo / forming without nose / or chin, the mouth / a permanent wound." Because the lips were the dog's first target, the poem invites us to link these sections, though it never says so. The mouth "no lips can ever hope / to zipper shut" leaves the reader to put the story together.
The third section completes that story, and its warmth is a surprise. The donor's face is "too young / to have had laugh lines," and at first it is "as firm… as a glass slipper," beautiful but inert, a thing that has to be fitted rather than lived in. The surgery becomes "delicate diplomacy" between two parties who have never met, and the result is "the awkward wedding." Then the movement turns. The face "slowly fills / once again with feeling" and "softens / in the heat / of an unfamiliar dance." The ball in Cinderella becomes the slow, uncertain business of a new face learning to move.
The poem's structure supports this progression. Every section is built from tercets, and there is no rhyme, only short, enjambed lines. The line breaks often hold the reader at an edge, as in "Unclipped toe- / nails click," where a word is cut in two the way the body is cut and rejoined. The sounds are small and hard (click, linoleum, slipper) in the first two sections, while the last section ends on softer, longer sounds. Temperature follows the same arc, from "cold linoleum" in the first section to "heat" in the last.
The poem matters because it takes the Grimm stories' dark undertone seriously. Those tales were never as sweet as their happy endings, and Bonta suggests that the real version of "happily ever after" is messier: a body at risk, a stranger's flesh, a fragile truce. He doesn't pretend that a prince, a mirror or a slipper can save anyone. But he lets the ending give a little back, so that a face which began as glass becomes a living thing again.