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.