Linda Pastan

For Ira With the seal of science emblazoned on your forehead, like the old Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, I believe what you tell me about cells and molecules, though I can't see them. And though the language you speak is full of numbers and symbols I'll never understand; though your tie is askew and your hair unruly, still I believe what you say about the size of the universe, which is either expanding or contracting, I've forgotten which already. So if tomorrow you tell me you made a small miscalculation, that God indeed created the world in 6 short days, then rested on the 7th, that it was Eve who landed us in all this trouble, I would believe you. I would believe you as I've always done before.

Dear lost sharer of silences, I would send a letter the way the tree sends messages in leaves, or the sky in exclamations of pure cloud. Therefore I write in this blue ink, color of secret veins and arteries. It is morning here. Already the postman walks the innocent streets, dangerous as Aeolus with his bag of winds, or Hermes, the messenger, god of sleep and dreams who traces my image upon this stamp. In public buildings letters are weighed and sorted like meat; in railway stations huge sacks of mail are hidden like robbers' booty behind freight-car doors. And in another city the conjurer will hold a fan of letters before your outstretched hand— "Pick any card. . . " You must tear the envelope as you would tear bread. Only then dark rivers of ink will thaw and flow under all the bridges we have failed to build between us.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind, For I am soft and made of melting snow —Queen Elizabeth I Her sex sent her mother to the tower, made her father profligate with arrogant desires, but she was made of flint and backbone. Think of a young girl in a blue velvet bodice, a white collar and lace, the very prototype of virginal. Think of a woman, her court enlivened by suitors and lovers in doublets, in brocaded cloaks, despite suspicions of their motives staining the sheets, the way cups of spicy, flowery mead were sipped despite the possibility of poison. Even the crown of the sun must go down each night. Could she have stood at the prow of a ship in that great Armada she ordered, instead of at a window, waiting for urgent results? Could she have guessed that the words of a man she inspired, carved into the marble of ages, had a muscular beauty more than equal to her own worldly triumphs? Daughter, Queen, Ruler of roiling seas, of meandering rivers and meadows, of armies of soldiers, their swords and armor glittering like planets to her sun. Namesake to an age. And Poet? When she turned to the empty parchment (or once to a windowpane, a diamond for quill) everything must have gone quiet. Even a queen is naked before the naked page, awaiting not the generous spoils owed to a victor but the gifts freely given of a besotted muse.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1. A cardinal hurls itself at my window all morning long, trying so hard to penetrate its own reflection I almost let it in myself, though once I saw another red bird, crazed by the walls of a room, spatter its feathers all over the house. 2. My whole childhood is coming apart, the last stitches about to be ripped out with your death, and I will be left—ridiculous, to write condolence letters to myself. 3. The deathwatch beetle deathwatch beetle A small beetle which sounds like a ticking watch when boring into wood earned its name not from its ugliness or our terror of insects but simply because of the sound it makes, ticking. 4. When your spirit perfects itself, will it escape out of a nostril, or through the spiral spiral / passage Refers to the cochlea of the inner ear passage spiral / passage Refers to the cochlea of the inner ear of an ear? Or is it even now battering against your thin skull, wild to get through, blood brother to this crimson bird?

The biography of the bee is written in honey and is drawing to a close. Soon the buzzing plainchant of summer will be silenced for good; the flowers, unkindled will blaze one last time and go out. And the boy nursing his stung ankle this morning will look back at his brief tears with something like regret, remembering the amber taste of honey.

How did I get so old, I wonder, contemplating my 67th birthday. Dyslexia smiles: I’m 76 in fact. There are places where at 60 they start counting backwards; in Japan they start again from one. But the numbers hardly matter. It’s the physics of acceleration I mind, the way time speeds up as if it hasn’t guessed the destination— where look! I see my mother and father bearing a cake, waiting for me at the starting line.

are heading south, pulled by a compass in the genes. They are not fooled by this odd November summer, though we stand in our doorways wearing cotton dresses. We are watching them as they swoop and gather— the shadow of wings falls over the heart. When they rustle among the empty branches, the trees must think their lost leaves have come back. The birds are heading south, instinct is the oldest story. They fly over their doubles, the mute weathervanes, teaching all of us with their tailfeathers the true north.

When I was nearly six my father opened his magic doctor bag: two tongue depressors fastened by a rubber band; one flick of his hairy wrist and lo! we invented flight.

I call and hear your voice on the answering machine weeks after your death, a fledgling ghost still longing for human messages. Shall I leave one, telling how the fabric of our lives has been ripped before but that this sudden tear will not be mended soon or easily? In your emptying house, others roll up rugs, pack books, drink coffee at your antique table, and listen to messages left on a machine haunted by the timbre of your voice, more palpable than photographs or fingerprints. On this first day of this first fall without you, ashamed and resisting but compelled, I dial again the number I know by heart, thankful in a diminished world for the accidental mercy of machines, then listen and hang up.

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit, Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking." —William Shakespeare 1. Imagine waking to a scene of snow so new not even memories of other snow can mar its silken surface. What other innocence is quite like this, and who can blame me for refusing to violate such whiteness with the booted cruelty of tracks? 2. Though I cannot leave this house, I have memorized the view from every window— 23 framed landscapes, containing each nuance of weather and light. And I know the measure of every room, not as a prisoner pacing a cell but as the embryo knows the walls of the womb, free to swim as its body tells it, to nudge the softly fleshed walls, dreading only the moment of contraction when it will be forced into the gaudy world. 3. Sometimes I travel as far as the last stone of the path, but every step, as in the children's story, pricks that tender place on the bottom of the foot, and like an ebbing tide with all the obsession of the moon behind it, I am dragged back. 4. I have noticed in windy fall how leaves are torn from the trees, each leaf waving goodbye to the oak or the poplar that housed it; how the moon, pinned to the very center of the window, is like a moth wanting only to break in. What I mean is this house follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole, obeys the commandments of broom and of needle, custom and grace. It is not fear that holds me here but passion and the uncrossable moat of moonlight outside the bolted doors.