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Whenever I see two women crowned, constellated friends it is as if three birch trees wept together in a field by a constant spring. The third woman isn’t there exactly, but just before them a flame bursts out, then disappears in a blurred, electric shining that lifts my hair like an animal’s. In an aura of charged air I remember my poor mother turned into royalty, my sister and me in bobby socks endlessly, all summer long calling each other Margaret Rose and Lillibet, Lillibet, Lillibet, pretending to be princesses... Now, swollen into these tall blooms like paper cutouts in water, in each new neighborhood garden always, two women talking nod their three curly heads together: with bits of dirt on their foreheads, speckled iris, flaming poppy in the backyard dynasties of the multiflora it is the famous funeral photograph of the Dowager Queen, Queen Mother, stunned Young Queen, three stepping stones in marble that haunt me forever, clear and mysterious as well water, the weight of it in a bronze bucket swinging powerfully from my hand. As the plumcolored shadow rises, full as a first child in the orchard, the lost gardening glove on the path, the single earring tucked in an odd corner of the purse and then found here double themselves, then triple: in these soft trinities the lives that begin in us are born and born again like wings. Secret as doves scuffling in the wide envelope of wombs like loose, comfortable aprons flung over the heads of friends leaning together in the hum of earth’s plainsong like a three part round, like a single voice murmuring the dream never leaves us, of the self like a three masted vessel still voyaging: out of the long matrix of memory, the royal bulbs in the hold, the ballast that keeps us upright, loyal to the dark, deep-bedded throne of the old country each new soul claims as its own.

The economical ikebana of the lesser octopus is disarming, a sextopus, holding its intelligence & ink in a concentrate. Not some sloppy octopus who suddenly freaks, so princessy, rich. Driven to abstraction not unlike flowers dropping their petals because petals are garbage off the bloom, not expensive anymore thus going inside to find meaning. Cut the eyes, then, from the cruel ikebana of the racehorse— if a leg breaks she can't bear her own weight, long-blossomed head turns to glue and the fortune zooms off like flies from a carcass when shooed. The tripod fell so I had to cast about for my crutch to walk over—my bad left knee buckling— to right it. I want to take a picture of the flowers I arranged after an ikebana class, just one. I quit quickly but still hope to learn to arrange beauty classically. Maybe I'm lazy, or don't apply the rules to myself, or maybe "laze" is just "zeal" rearranged, as in my case. Even now, the clock we need to punch out on is too far away to plug in, so power collects in its hands.

In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much - how little - is within our power

The night the world was going to end when we heard those explosions not far away and the loudspeakers telling us about the vast fires on the backwater consuming undisclosed remnants and warning us over and over to stay indoors and make no signals you stood at the open window the light of one candle back in the room we put on high boots to be ready for wherever we might have to go and we got out the oysters and sat at the small table feeding them to each other first with the fork then from our mouths to each other until there were none and we stood up and started to dance without music slowly we danced around and around in circles and after a while we hummed when the world was about to end all those years all those nights ago

As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them— I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect machine from 1948, at the latest, and made of shining plastic with the numbers sharp and clear and slightly magnified in that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely small and yet his tiny brain alert for he is the one who will crow and not that broken buzzing relic, though time is different now and dawn is different too, you were up all night and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting to see what direction you should face and if you were born in time or was it wasted and what the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.

Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss; This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys; Death proves them all but toys; None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade. All things to end are made, The plague full swift goes by; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector’s brave; Swords may not fight with fate, Earth still holds ope her gate. “Come, come!” the bells do cry. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us. Wit with his wantonness Tasteth death’s bitterness; Hell’s executioner Hath no ears for to hear What vain art can reply. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us. Haste, therefore, each degree, To welcome destiny; Heaven is our heritage, Earth but a player’s stage; Mount we unto the sky. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us.

I Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. II Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. III Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

You go from me In June for months on end To study equanimity Among high trees alone; I go out with a new boyfriend And stay all summer in the city where Home mostly on my own I watch the sunflowers flare. You travel East To help your relatives. The rainy season's start, at least, Brings you from banishment: And from the hall a doorway gives A glimpse of you, writing I don't know what, Through winter, with head bent In the lamp's yellow spot. To some fresh task Some improvising skill Your face is turned, of which I ask Nothing except the presence: Beneath white hair your clear eyes still Are candid as the cat's fixed narrowing gaze —Its pale-blue incandescence In your room nowadays. Sociable cat: Without much noise or fuss We left the kitchen where he sat, And suddenly we find He happens still to be with us, In this room now, though firmly faced away, Not to be left behind, Though all the night he'll stray. As you began You'll end the year with me. We'll hug each other while we can, Work or stray while we must. Nothing is, or will ever be, Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart, But what we hold in trust We do hold, even apart.

Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner came to “first-aid training” at the fire station, his slide carousel set up to eliminate the easy pukers. The frog was not dead but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle. You wind up with something dead enough to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide as a cellophane sheet, which I did so eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said: Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua gnawed through his stomach. Click. Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo. (I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click. It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drano. Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living, which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact. Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base not the top of the skull and remember to turn down the heat. Click. There are many people in this world on whom nobody checks in very often. Click. The warmer the room, the quicker a body will turn black and bloat. Click. If you have a dog it is important to leave out what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food. Click, click, then there was nothing but a slab of light to signal he was through. And it was then that I remembered the frog, not that the coroner had spoken of frogs. What he said was, If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars, that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.

In what sense I am I a minor observer as in a dream absorbed in the interior, a beardless youth unaccountably remote yet present at the action reminding me faintly of Prufrock. . . . a diminutive figure barely discernible seemingly ageless escapes me. The original impulse to sing compressed into one exultant note breaks out of the chest-space, vibrating along the shoulders in the presence of full-bodied womanliness, the eyes dark in the inner scene, the hair long and black, our dark lady, inmate of courtship. She does not speak. She is nameless. The reason for her presence there is unknown. A shepherd, vaguely associated, stands at a distance under a birch tree, causally, playing a flute. Sweetness streams across. . . . also from the balance and the position of each, it issues. Neither moves. The scene is not matter that can pall or diminish. Its secret holds as fast as I. As in Giorgione the suspense is eternal.