Inside the picture it is 1903—late spring or early summer.
The three women sit on the front porch steps,
a potted fern to their right on the middle stair,

This quill is a wand;
I wave it about

All is flux.
The wet wars against the dry,
The cold against the hot,

While the rain comes pouring down,
Chekhov, in his white peaked hunting cap,
And prone beside a rick of hay, surveys

A sort of cypress reached
Halfway up the longer window;
I came to live here, all the same.

as she lies there, her flesh cooling, on a table,
what blush easing the furniture of her body
toward the invisibility in a mirror

I remember erecting a screened-in porch
for a house I lived in, the staple gun
all afternoon like a giant mosquito

Deep in the house your Singer sang its dirge,
one more thread clipped stealthily from conscience.
Who sewed the gowns and blouses of the Fates?

Those heavy, drowned-washrag, still moonless nights
our hands would test the blindness of our faces,
tourists scratching their names on marble columns

The palms looked wary even in broad afternoon,
thin women in fancy ribbed hats.
Beyond them the hooded sweep of the St. Johns