The magic of three women together
Is black magic
Hag magic
Magic done in the dark.
Three women together
Blasted heath
Side of the road
Waiting in the silvery
Darkness of a foggy
Scottish night.
To poison a kingdom,
pour into a Thane’s ear
the death-dealing essence
Of the Truth-That-Will-Be-Now-You-Know,
Macbeth must be told,
Infected with gossipy
prophecy
And the wild information, released,
will rot away
A kingdom.
Or three women together
Pass an eye
Between them
As a hearing trumpet was once shared
Among spinsters,
Frugal, distressed, or into the idea
Of access to the world
Only when her sisters
Are blinded.
No competing interpretations of a shared event are possible
If you only perceive
In rotation.
There is surely witchcraft here,
in making three women
into one mind.
Or three women together
Sit at the base of a tree
And your life passes fast as
Swift water, the moments shining
Like film in a silver blur
As they run through the women’s hands,
And one measures and one
Spins and one
Cuts.
Sequential perception again,
In its way.
Or three women together
The virgin the mother and
The other one,
The lady of a certain age,
The lady of situations,
Somehow make up a whole
And encompass together the
Whole continuity of time
And lineage
As life runs through them in
A silver stream.
The magic of three women together
Is the magic of calamity
The magic of endings
The magic of grief
The magic of shocks
The magic that is wailing to the skies and the rending of garments,
The magic of something
Precious
Breaking.