It is solstice, the longest night, the veil of the year worn thin. It is the night of the universal goddess in her solitary labor: the birth of eternal return, time revolving forward and back. In her hands the curtains rustle; she hangs silks purchased this morning on Princess Road, color stirring pavonine in the lamplight of her bedroom.

Concatenating shifts of gold. Curtained, veiled, screened from the moonless street, she embraces the fate—stirring, rustling, revealing its inconstant hues beneath her fingers as she draws seclusion across the insulating glass—that she has, for lack of courage, or for courage, chosen. There are lampshades in matching saffron at her bedside, at her desk. Fresh wallpaper striped in a honeybee’s plush, floors and baseboards banded black. A queen’s cell, amber lit. Gold and black: honeybee, daffodil, laburnum.

Pregnant with Frieda at Yaddo in the fall of 1959, plotting their retreat to England a month later, she had dreamt of a room in London, its bed set prophetically among acres of daffodils. The scent of soil carnal and dark in her sleep, the yellows so rich she could feel them through her eyelids.

It meant nothing at the time, a dream; no pattern, no context. Pure enigma. Now the queen cups of the daffodil; now the cede of Taliesin’s honey isle. The patterns unloose, breaking into facets: eyelash, breath, lip, eye.

Her second Fulbright year, just returned from their honeymoon summer in Spain. Their marriage green still, at her own anxious insistence concealed from the spinsterly proctors at Cambridge and the possibility of censure. Ted jobless, aimless in Yorkshire, in London; waiting for the mail, bored with his poems and clumsy gropings at a play, writing letters two and three times a day that only made his balls ache with longing for her, and telling her so. Living like an eyelash only, a fragment of herself, unable to think—what, in turn, she wrote to her mother, justifying her marriage against the mandate to achieve. She needed him to be her best self; together, they were one complete person, one mind. Torn from his side, Eve from Adam’s rib, the distance left her bereft, in wrenching agony. An eyelash only.

Six-sided the cells of the hive, six thousand the facets of the eye. Ocelli, the simple eye: modulations of light and dark. Ommatidia, the compound eye: many jeweled lenses hexagonal as honeycomb, each sensitive to color, to movement, to the position of the sun in the sky. Six thousand images become a pattern of reality, a composite of any moment in time or space.