This is what comes of a Lammas Eve, tho I did not think of that at all this
year until I had awakend at two in the night with the lines “My mother
would be a falconress. And I a falcon at her wrist” being repeated insistently
in my mind. I got up and took my notebook into the kitchen, for it would
not let go. And when I wrote down the hour and date, I saw it was Lammas
“August I, 1964,” I wrote: “Lammas tide, 2 AM.” Then I remembered that
George Stanley had told me that Saturn, my birth-planet, was particularly
brilliant in the sky. “But that’s between one- thirty and two in the morning,’
he said, “long after you are asleep.”