But once upon a time is now, and here
They spill from the car, spirits bean-stalk high,
To take the world as proper heroes do—
Ambitious first, born-winner third
And enigmatic middle, for whose life
No tale provides a shape definitive.
A band of brothers, peas from the one pod,
Their father’s features comically scaled down:
And I am left who have compelled
Their several childish orbits long enough
To feel the chill of a discarded sun,
By age and sex proscribed from comradeship.
I see them strange among the other strangers
And, waiting for the lights to change, I muse
On archetypal mothers who knew best
And pottered at the stove—or died
Warm in the fiction of being necessary,
with all their youth and beauty on them still.
Image credit: Martin Vorel
