hola Bratsche (Doug, I think it is),

Reading you is always a trip and today perhaps more than most ... Makes me smile to navigate the uncharted waters of your syntax and simagery ... (both of which, for me, are slippery but inviting)

And I think I share your pov and your questions (slipperiness factored in) ... I too reacted to 'goldenrod grave' with curiosity - it sort of felt like an update of Ozymandias to me - and add to it that belladonna is also poisonous ... and baked Alaska serves up a play on words in multiple directions ... the fact that the goldenrod grave dwellers are "grandmas" poses its own jostling of associations ...

And as to the line MA had challenged and you take up here "..or so I remember, or so I say." .... I come down on your side (if I gather you rightly) ... The phrase comes in reference to the narrator's contextualizing of Miss Calico's being "fished out" moment ... and taps into what i read as our individual subjective power to contextualize events in ways that tend over time especially to suit our fancy - as you say, a if not THE greatest psychological freedom we have ... a piece of that freedom to at least shape our attitude toward things - and how we contextualize them (in this case, he seems to want to juxtapose her forlorn downward-spiral fate into the dumpster with the high-flying "eastbound roar[ing] through necklaces of skyline" - which i in my own subjective take read as pointing to the vagaries of life yielding asymmetry and injustice and high contrast) ...

or something like that... The various touches seem to align in the direction of poignancy about a human life ... lost in the shuffle - and yet not "lost" - for the narrator has noticed, engaged her in the intimacy of rather candid interaction and guarded her memory ...

thanks for the 'nano critique' and carpe verve to you too

z