In part III, the poet recalls childhood events in the context of an awareness of her own ageing. “To be an animal / is to watch,” the poet says in “The Deer,” “Is to think / about eating all the time;” in a similar way she watches her childhood, nourishing herself on memories. In a moment of thoughtless “cruelty,” in “The Tin House,” she and her brother run a stick along the metal corrugations of an old man’s dwelling, tormenting him and witnessing his silent suffering: “he stood quiet, not moving / … a shape in a window.” In “Winter,” the poet dreams of her former partner and their children: “my here to your not-here,” “And our boy was a boy,” and of the continuity of the bloodline over time, as seen in the dream’s clever symbolism: “You and he / were putting up flags… you standing / at the rope’s one end, our boy / at the other. The dream’s genius.”

As part III progresses, death becomes ever-present. In the poem “Yes Loves No,” Yes has a fascination with the place of death: “Yes just wants / to get to the graveyard.” As with the above homage to Keats, the poet recalls Frost here: “by the side / of that road rarely traveled,” though giving the line a macabre twist in suggesting that the road “less traveled” (Frost, “The Road Not Taken”) is actually the path to death. Continuing the Frost metaphor of the forest, a friend dies in the poem “In the Woods: A Suite.” Here, we find the most moving passage in this collection of poetry, in which music takes us — in spite of ourselves, our fear, our angry rejection of the end — to that nonverbal place in which we know about death:

If Brahms’s fury is a catalyst that can enable us to face death, this emotion is suppressed in the final poem in the collection, “O Gods of Smallest Clarity.” Like the “exhausted / baby” at the beginning of its life in the poem “Elevator,” also in part III, the poet herself seems exhausted by life — by human conflict, human selfishness, and perhaps by her own restless looking back — calling on the gods to