And here, where the pin pricked the silken red rib
Louise’s pen was at the port of turning to—yes,
mum; no, mum. Her mother had said, Don’t talk
to me like that, young lady. Lady Grey grew tired
of looking out her little window. The port
of turning back to the world with a sense of revulsion.
Progress, Louise said, is a slow evolution. One pads along,
plots a great gong, then waits for the next devolution.
Are we too many? she asked. There was a lamp
at the end of the funnel. Let’s stand—she gestured to the distance—
at the counter. There she divided the days:
one for you, one for me, and one for the girl with the ruby tattoo.
The lights in the trees made a cat’s cradle
of the lines they had used to define them. Wand world,
word elision. Happy was the stiff
birch, snappy the branches in the tree wind. Rewind, she said,
and you’ll see the gray slate of autumn, astray
from an off-center center. O kiss the night that it comes up
so often and blanks out what surrounds the lampposts,
leaving only the camp mid-song. The cowboy and cowgirl
drinking their evening Madeira.
The wire wrapping them keeps wrapping, choking the poster-girl
blond until she coughs up a quick succession of three over four
divided by dawn. It breaks, said Louise, because it won’t bend.