Ekphrasis of the ears

I've been listening to gospel lately. As in, I can't get enough of it. It is almost overwhelming; or maybe I'm listening to it in order to be overwhelmed. But come on, how do you not feel that shit in every single pore?

Anyway, so I listened not to gospel but to Nico's These Days from the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack and ended up with this. I'd take input on the title.
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The Mud Princess and the Galosh Bride


Because she asked I help Layla
into the pink princess dress Grandma
sent her for Halloween last year. And

because she asked I let Layla help me
with the 39 mother of pearl buttons
from the nape of my neck to the small

of my back to get me enclosed in our
mother's time-yellowed wedding dress
that we found while cleaning the closet.

And because it rained the entire night
before, even if the morning sky is blue
now, the morning ground is a viscous

auburn and I insist we wear our rain boots
if she wants to take these gowns outside,
the mud sucking, slurping a song, each

of our steps keeping time all the way from
the cottage down to the creek, the swish
of aged lace and polyester lining, a nylon

brush against the snare as I sway through
cattails and ribbon grass, the sister ten
years my younger, the sister with a mind

stuttering on second-grade spelling words
while walking through halls of a rural
secondary school, this sister speaks songs

of the chickadee and sings questions to the
answers the momentary loss of oxygen
to her brain deceives her into believing

she doesn't know. She claps fairytales
and whistles fables, asks me if I am
a hare or a tortoise, laughing because

she thinks I think I am just a human.
And I can scream into my pillow and
curse my father nightly for swallowing a

two-month stockpile of 100 mg capsules
of amitriptyline with his nightly Pepsi on
the feast day of St Rita of Cascia, then took

us, to show us, how a 1987 BMW 5-series
swims in Cullaby Lake with a family of five
inside, but he taught her something like truth

in patience and goodness so that while I insist
on ramming my forehead into the inside
of the aquarium glass, perseverate on the night

I became a new mother at 18, a new mother
of a 3'10", 49 pound reborn child, Layla delights
in the grasshoppers and ants inside her skull,

tugging at my hand even though she now
stands nearly above my shoulder, impossible
to miss with a smile I'm daily terrified someone,

sometime will mine for all the purity it is worth,
tugging at my hand to tell me somehow, this, us
in our mud-hemmed dresses at the water's edge,

a field spotted with huckleberry bushes and what
Sitka spruce survived the Tillamook Burn between
us and everything else, it must be a fable.

Sing me a story.

It must be a fable.

Sing, sister, sing.

This must be a fable.

Sing.

This must be a fucking fable.


Two sisters sit on one spruce stump near
a stream's edge, mud and grass and leaves
dying and redecorating their gowns of
once-white German lace, still-iridescent
pink taffeta trimmed with gold-braided
cord, one's mind stalled under the accelerator
forever floored at the bottom of Cullaby Lake
by a drowned corpse's bones, the other's voice
reverberating in the valley between driver
and passenger-side doors, calling, pleading
for forgiveness to the mother, father, brother,
left behind, left for decay in their seatbelts.

Aesop, please, make me a moral, write me
a fable that I can lull myself to sleep with.