She’s been thinking about this new collection of poems, their sequence, which to include, for nearly a month. Savoring the process, drawing it out, this pleasure of creating order, creating a truth, a logic and drive, out of their present seeming randomness. She knows certain things now: how many total—forty-one, just as in Ted’s brilliant second collection, Lupercal, the one that made him famous; this numerical scorecard is less an ego indulgence than it is purely superstitious, salt tossed over her shoulder. She knows, too, something about the movement of the poems as a body, how they rise like a startled flock, flying as one, wheeling, spreading chaotically across the sky, finally alighting in the same tree. She knows the story she wants them to tell. It is her story. It is where she wills herself to go; it is an incantation. She’s giving shape to her life, past and future, with these poems. Like the arrangement of cards in a Tarot deck as they are turned up, it is not just the poems but their relation to each other that matters. She knows where she wants to begin.

The first poem is “Morning Song”; its first word is “love.” She likes that, likes that it’s a London poem. It seems symbolically right: she’s wearing, this minute, the same flannel Victorian nightgown—threadbare now, a London draft blowing up the hem, standing the hair on her unshaved legs on end. As in the poem, her baby, now two of them, will wake soon, calling to her with their twinned morning songs. It started with love, the life she wants to order; she resists the coming of bitterness into her head, of Ted, of how frightened and bereft she has been, how brittle, on some subterranean level, she knows today’s elation to be—she wants this moment, the sun blooming hesitantly through the window before her, her room filling with moody winter light, her manuscript complete in her hands, solely to herself, untainted.