by Carolyn KizerThe large lady laboriously climbs down the ladder from a gun emplacement. She had gone up to contemplate the blue view and to damage the gun. She has done neither for the view was a baize haze and the rooted gun immovable in stone. So she climbs down the shaky ladder with a few rungs missing carrying her mostly uneaten picnic lunch of which she has consumed a single hard-boiled egg leaving the shell not as litter but as symbolism on the sullen gun in its grey rotunda. At the foot of the ladder she finds sand; and one brown, shuttered house from which another lady stares. This one wears a blurry face and an orange dress matching her orange hair in a bun. The large lady perforates along the beach on her high-heeled pumps by the water's verge, as a large, pale water-bird might do. When she reaches her own cottage near the bay, she finds a letter from the strange orange lady in its crisp white envelope lying on the table: "I am an admirer of your poesy, so I am baking you a fresh peach pie," the nice note reads. "Do come to my house near the bay," she speaks in her head, "Orange lady who admires my poesy." "We will sit here quietly, in twlilght, and drink a cup of carefully brewed tea." With a sigh, she puts aside the memory of the grey gun she could only decorate but not destroy. Though clear in her eye she holds a vision; the thin, ceremonious shell of her eaten egg painted by the sun against the sky.
