Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos

Not normally drawn to the preordained,

but in Max Liebermann’s

“The Flax Barn at Laren,” his weavers retreat, freed from their wheels, hand turned

by children on stools. Pearly North Sea light

traces tangents of flax thread warming the women’s hands.

The barn could revolve around one central

post, a parallax effect reducing the weavers

to few, partially blocking some, while children remain shadowed lumps at labour, engines in wooden shoes

none of us can un-see though don’t bother

naming. Each should be mounted on Strand Eseln in lee of coastal dunes, sea grasses, sand fleas, and

the tufted manes. There’s a photo of Walter

Benjamin, age four, perched on a beach donkey at a Trassenheide resort. Short pants, his little knees, his gaze hooked

on a flash of bright beyond the left shoulder

of the lens that’s trained on him — though I would say that. Perhaps, to him, he’s looking exactly where he’s been directed

to look, smile, please, hold the reins and wait.

Overhead, the stage of a pier follows perspective lines, dutifully collapsing at a roofed shelter some way out to sea,

low tide, the vertical and offset piles climbed

by kelp and mussel reverse the light-dark schema of the donkey’s legs or continue Walter’s bare, plump legs disappearing into black ankle boots. Weirdly,

if you look for the photo online, it comes always twinned with one of Kafka at six, in studio, holding the reins

of a toy-horse-slash-sheep, deeply aware of his

ears in light, ferns, fake spruce staged on broad planks arranged to mean wilderness keep company with his thick wool

breeches over black knee socks and riding boots

we can count the buttons of. The sheep-horse has a feather in its cap, a single hieroglyphic eye. The young are

to die when we say in service of our need

for replications of them.

I’ve kept 106 digital images of Jack and Rosie, the animals my son would not ride

that summer at the Scarborough seaside.

Infinitely gentle, blanketed donkeys with eyes like misted bitumen, he’d stare, from a ways off, then slowly shake

his head, even walked the same circuit some

distance from them as kids lined up for their turn. Where do they live, Dad? Who named them? When?

Don’t they get bored?

He didn’t ask me any of that. Not then. And has

no memory now of ever having been there, the crab’s shell drilled through by gulls I showed him, the turn in weather,

far out over water, as though the sea had risen

in anger. The walk back, all quiet, holding a featureless stone striped once by quartz, common, but his now, kept warm.