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but struggle and she would have to escape to a place to hide her cache in a place they called “Diamond Vault” or “Inside Wings of Butterflies.”
    In the meantime…crouch and wait, small binoculars in hand. Walk the prison yard. A special dispensation to her scientific obsession. A fleet swallow. Pika sightings too—skittish, you remember, on the tundra. Dusk. Then you want to get down and pray up here, someone was overheard saying. And that she did get down in front of a form, the form of a Madonna, an elderly woman who seemed, as her car license indicated, from Nebraska, I always observed where they were from. Up again brushing the matter, glacial middens from knees. Twins are happier on the open road. Yes, twins are happier on the folksy road. She thought of the dark castellum and how relieved to be almost free of that unhappy mind.
    Liberated from a strange and compromised nightmare.
    She was a founder, had they forgotten?
The other was riding her coattails through the labyrinths of Samsara.
    Wizened stooped Original Anne would crouch down.
How could you not keep company with death in such a world?
she’d say.
    The other Anne:
It’s early on in the century and we’ll look back at our folly and be amused
. She, youthful other, clone of sister, twin in phobias and wayward plans.
    Original Anne who was one with the constant lustrations, a devotee in practice of cleansing, she was wearing a heart on a sleeve a tourniquet on a sleeve a house on a sleeve a survival tome on sleeve. It will not be amusing.
    She she
was one to remark upon this at length as
she she
said it the problems of
our new and early century
as if that would obviate desire and put a fine point on it all. And eschew a totality of responsibility.
    Where are you from?
    The void, both
shes
would say.
    Speak of cold storage, speak of the delicate plants, the Indian paintbrush just one, close to the Divide.
    The Divide between Deciders of ego and malice and ignorance, and those who do not chose to pluck this humble flower.
    They exchanged places for a cryptic moment
    Original Anne felt the dead pulse of the Deciders’ Anne
    Then a hurricane then humming then humility
    Joke about the tides in our bodies, the monthly motion and dip in mood, impressions in failure etched, affinities, delineations of going down
    Down where?
    Dear Original Anne: I will tell you this in writing and you may respond. More memos for the mind, begging response in the middle of the night, flaming e-mails by the light of a pallid moon…
    The sadness from the other side of the wall…
    I imagined the room
    Bare, but of essentials made…
    The writing book, a ledger star-crossed, archival items that find home here
    A legend
    I imagined a tomb for your holdings, a pyramid, a sepulchre, a vault
    I can track your every move
    I am your virus or your inventor
    I see your thoughts you will travel as you desire where to go, move through walls
    I could breathe love into you a perfect fabrication
    A competition?
    I could breath now
    A foil
    Who is most controlling and vile in our overworked world?
    Original Anne kept silent but nurtured her own counsel:
    I’m studying the tundra now, as a diamond tomb
    Its subtle form its very chill environment might contain, condense, preserve…
    a line of poetry brings language again to language
    startling in its brevity
    magic on the head of a pin
    microdots of inwardly spiraling space and time
    How small things survive under harsh conditions, a metaphor for all your paranoia will be answered. Investigate storms and the tempest of ice high on this shelf at the end of the world. Conflagrations set by angry insouciant campers. How often will the sun bake your thoughts to hardened clay? How will you be broken and fight back?
    In this brief digital age, never destroy the original singularities, voice recognitions that might haunt your sleep. How do they hibernate through coming millennia, how translate into your own thought forms so you have access to a time