What happens when the characters tumble from their tales? When rhyme stumbles, and the Goose remembers? In this playful and poignant poem, nursery rhymes unravel, fairy tales awaken, and the stories themselves walk past their plots.“Once Upon Askew” is a whimsical reflection on the lives of stories—and those who dwell within them.
or, The Story That Would Not Sit Still by Donald S. Yarab
Listen, child—I am the Old Grey Goose, And I was there when books came loose, When volumes tumbled, pages flew, And all the stories mixed like stew.
It started with a mighty thud— Books falling open, words like mud, All swirling, mingling, line by line, Till Alice’s world came mixing into mine.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” she cried, Right into Cow’s green pasture-side, Where “Hey Diddle Diddle” used to play— Now Cow asks questions all the day.
The Spoon caught Alice’s strange delight, Abandoned dishes, fled by night, Beneath a moon from whose bright story— From Carroll’s tale or Goose’s glory?
I squawked from my own tumbled page— Which book? What tale? What ancient age? While Cat’s grin stretched across our scene, Belonging nowhere, everywhere seen.
We passed the wall where once he sat— Poor Humpty, puzzled, round, and flat. Though patched, he watches, cracked but clear, And murmurs, “Not all ends end in fear.”
But one lay still beyond the swirl— A slumbering, untouched young girl. The tales all passed; she did not wake, No prince, no plot her trance to break. Yet in her stillness, something stirred— A dream not shaped by spoken word.
We found Red Riding Hood alone, Her basket lost, her sure path gone. The Wolf came next—not sly, but stunned, As if unsure what he had done. They walked apart, then side by side, Two stories stripped of fear and pride, Each wondering if what they knew Was ever really, wholly true.
So off we walked, this mixed-up crew: Alice with questions, Cow with moo That carried wisdom, Spoon with light From every moon and every night.
Behind us trailed the broken bits— Half-rhymes and verbs that sought their fits, Metaphors in mismatched dancing shoes, Still seeking out their missing clues.
No longer bound by story’s rules, We’d become something new, no fools— Not quite the characters we’d been, Not free of them—but in between.
And hovering above our band, That smile from Cheshire’s distant land— A grin that needs no cat to hold, A question that will not be told.
This is what happens, child, you see, When stories tumble, wild and free— They find they’re more alike than not, And walk together past their plot.
“Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” (“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”) —Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)
But perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps the truth is simpler: When the stone is gone, the man remains.
Sisyphus Undone; or, It Was Tuesday
by Donald S. Yarab
He rose, as ever, with the morning’s breath, the hill still steep, the silence oddly wide. No stone to greet him with its weight or will— no groan of earth, no task to be defied.
The gods were gone. Their laughter had grown faint, or else the air refused to carry sound. The path he wore through centuries lay bare, a scar now healing into senseless ground.
He searched for signs: a crack, a trace, a mark, but found no proof that toil had ever been. His hands, once strong with strain, now idle hung, still shaped by burdens long dissolved within.
He sat. The dust rose lightly at his knee. A lark began to sing, then flew away. The sky, untroubled, held no word for him. The world had turned. It was another day.
What is the self when labor fades to wind? What is the myth once struggle slips its chain? He breathed. No answer stirred the lucid air. The hill was whole. The man was left, and plain.
“Every door leads deeper. Every step farther from certainty.” (Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective View of a Corridor, 1662, oil on canvas)
Prefatory Note
In my youth — now roughly four decades past — while studying the slender yet profound Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of St. Bonaventure, there arose in my mind a simple observation: “Thin books are dangerous.” By their brevity, they conceal depths which the unwary may mistake for shallows. By their compactness, they pierce more swiftly, and leave marks more enduring than tomes of a thousand pages.
The small variations presented below draw their form, though not their genius, from the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges — that master of mirrors, labyrinths, and forgotten libraries. If there is any virtue herein, it is owed to his example; if there is error, it is mine alone.
May the reader proceed with care, for the thinnest books, and perhaps the thinnest tales, are those most difficult to escape.
“The shortest books require the longest penance.” — Anonymous marginal note, Biblioteca Laurenziana
I. The Library of Thin Books
In the city of Aram, whose streets no cartographer has ever agreed upon, there was once a secret library known only to a few scholars and fewer fools. It was said to contain the sum of human knowledge, but organized strangely: the thick books were shelved in dusty catacombs, seldom touched, while the thin books were kept in a bright chamber at the center, on shelves of polished cedar.
The Keeper of the Library explained this arrangement to all who entered: “The thick books are for forgetting. The thin books are for believing.”
Each thin book contained a single idea, expressed so perfectly that it resisted all argument. Sovereignty Belongs to the Strong was one book. The World is a Dream of the Gods was another. Still another was simply titled Obey.
Visitors who read the thick books emerged thoughtful and burdened, full of hesitations, counterexamples, and second thoughts. Visitors who read the thin books emerged transformed: resolute, fervent, certain.
Over time, it was not the heavy tomes that shaped Aram’s kings, priests, and scholars, but the thin volumes, read once and carried forever.
It is said that the city of Aram fell, not through invasion, nor famine, nor pestilence, but because, in the end, its citizens each lived by the idea of a different thin book, and could no longer understand one another.
The Library still stands, or so the story goes, though its doors are sealed and the books grow thinner by the century.
There is a final book, the thinnest of all, placed at the highest shelf where none but the Keeper can reach. It contains no words at all.
Its title is: Certainty.
⁂
II. The Shadows of the Books
There is a city — it does not matter which — where it is rumored that a second library exists beneath the great Library of Learned Tomes.
The surface library, the Library of Learned Tomes, is a noble place: its corridors are vast, its tomes heavy with ink and argument, and its readers slow, uncertain, weighed down by the burden of complexity. No truth is simple there; every assertion is marked and belied by a hundred footnotes, every conclusion bruised by rebuttal.
But below, beneath stone and time, there is another library. It is said to be vast but weightless. There, one finds only thin books — so thin they seem at times to flicker in the light, as if they might vanish.
Scholars, sensing the rumors, sometimes descend. They find books titled with dangerous simplicity: Justice is the Right of the Victorious,History is the Story We Tell Ourselves,The Future is Written.
Each thin book feels familiar. And well it should. For these thin books are the shadows of the thick books above¹: each vast, tangled treatise, compressed into a single, unassailable maxim.
The discovery at first seems marvelous. Why wrestle with a thousand pages when the essence can be grasped in a sentence? Why debate, when the answer can be carried in one’s pocket, ready for all occasions?
But the thin books are not summaries; they are distortions. They are what remains when doubt, nuance, and contradiction are stripped away. They are the husks of thought — seductive because they seem lighter, easier, final.
In time, those who read only the thin books come to mistrust the thick ones. They grow impatient with questions, contemptuous of ambiguity, zealous for a clarity that admits no appeal.
Some say that it was not neglect but the rise of the thin books that doomed the upper Library. That the heavy volumes grew dusty because the city’s rulers and citizens alike began to prefer the glimmer of certainty to the slow, earned labor of understanding.
In the end, the Library of Learned Tomes collapsed inward like a drained well. And the shadow library, weightless and triumphant, remained.
Somewhere, perhaps, it still remains.
Somewhere, perhaps, it is growing.
⁂
III. Coda: A Reflection in the Labyrinth
Some say that even the tale you have just read — the account of the thick and the thin, the surface and the shadow — is itself no more than a thin book: a single idea, polished to gleam, shorn of its necessary doubts.
If so, it is but one more glimmer in the labyrinth.
One more reflection upon reflections, cast by a candle already guttering.
One more danger to remember, and to forget.
IV. Scholium
¹ Cf. the lost Tractatus de Umbris Librorum (“Treatise on the Shadows of Books”), attributed to the forgotten scholar Balthasar of Istria (fl. late 13th century), who wrote: “The greater the volume, the more labyrinths it contains; the thinner the shadow it casts, the more swiftly it pierces the heart.” No complete manuscript survives, though fragments are said to be embedded in certain marginal glosses of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Some dispute the existence of Balthasar himself, suggesting he is merely the invention of later compilers seeking to dignify their own thinness with the patina of lost antiquity.
The Magpie (Oil on canvas, 1868) by Claude Monet (1840-1926). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
In a quiet land where the world often rested beneath a thick blanket of snow, a lone magpie perched on a wooden gate. The magpie, with its striking black-and-white feathers, was accustomed to the stillness and calm that the cold season brought.
One day, as the magpie foraged for food, it noticed a small bird struggling in the snow below. It was a young robin, shivering and weak, its bright red breast a stark contrast to the white landscape.
The magpie flew down to the robin and asked, “Why do you struggle here alone? This is no place for those unprepared for the cold.”
The robin, trembling, replied, “I lost my way in the snowstorm and now I am too weak to continue. I fear I won’t survive much longer.”
The magpie, though known for its cleverness and keen eye for survival, had a kind heart. Seeing the robin’s plight, the magpie said, “Come, I will help you. We must look after each other in difficult times.”
The magpie led the robin to a sheltered spot under a thick hedge, where the snow had not yet reached. It shared its small store of seeds and nuts, collected with care for such harsh times.
As the days passed, the magpie and the robin found warmth in each other’s company. The magpie taught the robin how to spot food even in the bleakest of landscapes, and in return, the robin shared songs of hope, lifting the magpie’s spirits.
In time, the robin’s strength returned, and she knew it was time to fly back to her own home. She thanked the magpie for her kindness and promised to return when the snow melted, to sing for her new friend the songs of spring.
The magpie, watching the robin take flight, felt a warmth in her heart that even the coldest winter could not freeze. She understood that while the snow had brought silence and stillness to the land, it had also brought them together, reminding her that even in the quietest moments, there is life, warmth, and connection.
Moral of the Fable
Adversity and difficulty often give rise to beauty, strength, and connection. In challenging times, the support and kindness we offer to others not only help them but also reveal our own inner resilience.
An Additional Treat – Lyrics based on the fable set to music
Lyrics by Donald S. Yarab, inspired by the fable “The Magpie in Winter,” set to music.
Swallow and Peony (woodblock print, pre-1945), Ohara Koson (1877-1945).
The Nightingale and the Rose
In a secluded grove, hidden deep within an ancient forest, there lived a nightingale whose song was unmatched by any other creature. Every evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, the nightingale would perch on a high branch and sing, filling the air with melodies so beautiful that even the stars seemed to pause and listen.
In the center of the grove grew a single rosebush, its flowers the color of a blush at dawn, delicate and fragrant. The nightingale loved the rosebush with all its heart, for it saw in the rose a beauty that mirrored its own song. Night after night, the nightingale would sing to the rose, hoping that the rose might hear the song and return its love.
But the rose, though beautiful, was unaware of the nightingale’s affection. It stood rooted in the earth, its petals turned toward the sun, drinking in the light and warmth. The rose did not understand the nightingale’s song, for it had never known love beyond the gentle caress of the morning dew or the kiss of the afternoon breeze.
One night, as the nightingale sang its most heartfelt melody, the moonlight filtered through the leaves, casting a silvery glow over the grove. The nightingale, filled with longing, poured all its love into the song, hoping to reach the rose’s heart.
The rose, touched by the nightingale’s song, began to stir. Its petals trembled, and for the first time, it felt something more than just the sun’s warmth or the wind’s touch. It felt the nightingale’s love, pure and unyielding. But the rose could not return this love in the way the nightingale desired. It could only bloom as it always had, beautiful but distant, its heart locked away in its delicate petals.
The nightingale, realizing that the rose could never love it as it loved the rose, sang one final song, a song of acceptance and farewell. It was a song that spoke of the beauty of love, even when unreturned, and of the joy in loving without expectation.
As the nightingale’s song faded into the night, the rose shed a single petal, a silent token of its appreciation for the nightingale’s devotion. The nightingale, with a heart full of love but no bitterness, flew away into the night, knowing that its love, though unrequited, had been true and pure.
The rose continued to bloom, its beauty admired by all who passed, but it was never the same after that night. It had been touched by the nightingale’s love, and though it could not return it, the memory of that love remained within its petals, giving them a deeper, more resonant hue.
Moral of the Fable
Love, even when unreturned, is a gift that enriches both the giver and the recipient. True love is selfless and does not demand reciprocation, finding its own beauty in the act of loving.
A Lyrical Treat Inspired by the Fable
A Four Stanza “Poem” based on the Fable set to a medieval-folk theme. Lyrics by Donald S. Yarab, Music by Udio.com.
Northcoast Antiquarian 