The themes of death and happiness are further juxtaposed in part II in “Simple Machines” and “Happiness: Three Definitions.” The “ticking quiet” is recalled in “Simple Machines” in the form of a knife that is invested with potential energy, allowing the poet deadly thoughts:

These few lines, redolent with the sharp alliteration of “t” sounds and the soft slicing suggested by its “s” alliteration, describes a moment in which the poet seems to feel the impetus for potentially harmful action. The poem following this chilling contemplation, “Happiness: Three Definitions,” sees humour in the Italian sacred relics industry, remarking that the bone set in plastic for sale was from “St Whoever,” “led to light,” “cost several dollars,” and meant that “one chicken / [had] died an awful death.” The poet’s dwelling on her lighter mood — “Can you be too happy? Put some / in a box… / Come Sadness” — recalls Keat’s “too happy in thy happiness” in “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which being too happy is closely associated with “sorrow / And leaden-eyed despairs.”

We are able to be happy because, as we are told in “Think of Words,” “life… seems unstoppable;” it is this that occupies our thoughts, “never the small, / hard eraser at the end of it.” In part II, the difficult reality of death is clearly in focus. “In a Frame, It Matters,” the poet considers “the days // one is grateful to eke out / in old age,” and in “All Night,” her partner exclaims, “Hey, we’re old!” This poem takes on a nostalgic mood as the poet recalls earlier times, until the tragedy of war interrupts with its deceptions and unspeakable pain:

Here, war, as with the eraser in “Think of Words,” breaks the comfortable though often fast-moving moments of train-of-thought reflection and braces us with the inevitability and perhaps suddenness of death. Similarly, in “The Drawing Manual,” the discussion on the essential aspects of shadow ends with the arresting revelation that, more than just an absence of light, it represents a passage to the realm of the devil: “it’s a window, throwing his underworld / shape to the floor.”