After the train wreck I found her hat in the top branches of a catalpa tree. It was all feathers, green and pink and blue, and it shivered in my hands like a starveling from Fiji too happy or frightened to remember its way home. Oh, it’s true, she drank too much champagne on all the wrong occasions. She hired a limousine when she could have crawled. Her laughter made me freeze, and when she exposed her breast I was a Naval Cadet about to leave for a losing war. “Something to die for,” she said. And I did, every night, every day. I told her not to take this train, puzzle of hot steel beside the river we never swam. But there was something out there that she needed more than me. So she donned her hat of tragic feathers and vanished from this life. And I am left in the present with a history that could never matter. I know what day it is, what hour, and I see many strangers whose Christmases did not work out, who broke under the pressure. And the frozen hare over there, isn’t he some kind of freedom fighter? Tribulations over rations. A hat that wants to fly to the moon.