The Triumph of Death

In your lace ruff you resemble a giant

              snowflake or a spider web

pearled with dew. What poets you catch

in your symmetries, at your long table at Wilton

              what wits (Spenser, Fulke-

Greville, Drayton) pitch into the roasted

piglet, stewed apples, carp.

              If you rowzed God up, He

knocked you back on your heels, Lady—

“O God, why hast thou thus

              Repulst, and scattred us?”—Through the high

windows at Wilton seethe

rumors of battle, Philip’s pussing thigh,

              death in the Lowlands. Mother Wrong,

Daughter Strife stalk the cities; still

you keep house with grammar, you salt the psalms

              for long preserving. “As smoke in wind,

as wax at fire doth waste”

the unjust dissolve. Your stanzas

              stay, still sting the tongue.

Dawn finds you kneeling on stone, calling

again the bleak God you believe

              will answer you.

You mix medicines, you write

in invisible ink. But Time

              trumps Fame which undoes Death

which masters Chastity and Love—which leaves

Eternity, your Master wrote, master of all.

              And like your lace, your lines

shine, not pale, “but whitely,

and more whitely pure

              than snow on windless hill that flaking falls,

as one whom labour did to rest allure.”

Translate us too, rough line by line,

              into your crystalline

severe design.