In These Soft Trinities

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.