Cup in plastic cup. Domed lids. Russian wood dolls bright lacquer primary colors which seem foreign nonetheless. Bells without clappers, babushka’s apron, a series of them ever more girlish. The last small girl like a bright cherry and the clean groove where each generation is slipped off at the waist. What if we enter it like dreams? In which, though sometimes frightened, we give ourselves over as if to water, a rim of suds forming along the slow swell and then the inexorable surf, bellying up, born of the rocking babushka’s swollen waters, wave like a soft claw over everything, sky’s soft turquoise blurred through salt crusted eyelids, the last touch of toenails, dancing til the wave crashes over and lifts and plunges, then scoured by the abrasive swirl that crabs feel ever and again in the pounding hours of dark morning and from which the tortoises are said to crawl shoreward, ancient, venerable, fecund: after centuries of gestation spewing a paste of moist pebbles, jade caviar from their wombs, webbed claws daubing over the smear with wet sand, moon in the quartz granules, venus in the copper, each egg a gelatinous eye. Try to see this: say there is only this life and then who dies will not be the one who fears dying but someone beyond her as if just passing into a dream past dying likewise beyond the fear or the sadness of the living she who already mourns her. Add in the possibility that time is one and we live each moment endlessly, this one, that, the pounding surf, the wet sand under the claw, cloudy plastic cup in a cup. Try to recall all the bodies you were within or were within you: see how sweet it is, how shapeless, a baby’s finger.