Frieda takes a dramatic breath and puffs, blowing through her pursed lips. She prances with impatience at the interruption of her play, a tempest of arrested motion. Her face is flushed. The tissue flutters. Sylvia, too, feels the strobe of fever. Three days, three nights, the nights, if luck holds, as evanescent as the last, through which her mind flickered until morning, lit by a biochemical flare. All night she flew through the protean boundaries of time, alert to the crackling of stars. All day the low pearlescent sky has made its accounting, gathering itself operatic and close, frost contracting the windows of the flat.

“All right, sweetie,” Sylvia capitulates, giving up the futile exercise, digging a sharp elbow into the stack of loose pages as they begin to slide, dabbing her two year old’s nose as Frieda squirms away.

Frieda squirms away, indignant, and the pages fall, blanketing the floor beside the bed. The damp tissue crumples in Sylvia’s fist.

Easing herself off the mattress, careful not to wake Nicholas, she crouches over the promiscuous splay of paper. To see it all, to keep it all in mind—her poems lay in much the same turbulent way they came, all out of order, not the evolutionary sequence she knows now nearly by heart, almost done, her heart, too, a turbulent thing. She reaches for the sheets, picking them up page by page. It is her heart’s story that she reassembles, its story built upon stories, its lingering ambiguities as authentic as anything else about her life, its ending as yet unsure.

Sylvia gathers the loose pages from the floor, inserting poems into their proper places, transposing others. She had told herself, told anyone who would listen: these poems saved her. She had thought she knew how, but how, like her heart, has changed. Frieda, engrossed by a toy piano, plinks her metallic, random scales. Sylvia’s sinuses pound as she stoops, lightheaded; she sweeps the rest of the pages together indiscriminately with the flat of her hand and sits back with them on the edge of the bed, turning them over, turning them right side up, her unsettled title page appearing out of the drifts, a list, as yet, of possibilities. Frieda trundles by with her piano; behind her aerial laces fly spectral past the windows.