The rise of the palpable dough, the flour-satined surface; the hard rap of a knuckle on the crust of the hot loaf. The children distracted with slabs of warm bread and honey, the oven door wedged once more, her hand in a mitt: ginger heat wafting into the kitchen, the leavening and the deepening color, lebkuchen and gingerbread losing their raw sheen. A change in the air—the first sheeting rain of autumn washing the dregs of summer away; or the barometer’s plunge, the pure iron descent of winter. Apples giving at the stem, unresistant to the grip of the branch, to the withered gold leaves. Words overtaking any possibility that they might mold themselves to some other shape, hardening to a form ineluctable and sure. The vein exhausted. The last man dead.

These poems, these pages she gathers up from the floor of the disarrayed parlor, slipping them into their files, their files into order, their edges squared—by November she had known what she had done. A second book of poems, a brilliant book, thirty poems written in roughly a month; not a projection for the future, one island in her archipelago of wishes, but incontrovertibly arrived. Yes, real: sharp as sudden pain. Not history but bodies piled where they fell in a mountain pass, bleeding still; not bodies piled in a mountain pass but her life, the wreckage and the spoils spread before her, the essential battle over. The truths fanning out a page at a time. No Greek drama but a life, a woman’s life, her own, and her marriage the real and bloody sacrifice.

Flushed and spent, she picks up playthings strewn across the flat, rag dolls laid waste in the hall, pots and pans and wooden spoons the children banged on, the lurid skins of dead balloons. Frieda follows behind, mimicking her mother, trilling as she pads earnestly through the hushed rooms, pushing her doll buggy, pocketing trifles—spools of thread, remnants of wallpaper. Nicholas crawls to the restocked toy basket in the parlor and plumps down, pulls arms and legs from the brimming pile, kisses the cold mouths.

The hard, complicated truths—Sylvia sweeps flour and scraps of dough from the kitchen floor, sorts the dirty laundry, stacks the empty paint cans by the door, making her reparations in a clarified world. Bathes the children after supper, stroking her hand over their slick, arching backs, rinsing the wet silks of their hair. Lathering a washcloth, she bends to Frieda’s whispered request: will she open the little blue door on her daughter’s leg? Sylvia’s forefinger and thumb turn the imaginary knob on Frieda’s soapy thigh. Frieda gasps, raising her eyes—“An owl!” They all watch, all three, lifting their faces to follow the invisible magic in its flight, Sylvia as willing as the children to believe, to trust the transforming act of a thought, a word, a transmission between bodies.