Situated in the culminating pages of Orlando, this sentence, bursting with biographical evasion, coy euphemism, faux calm and literal legerdemain depicts the risky, high-stakes ventures of women who labour. The biographer's hand, like a doctor screening a woman's erogenous and procreative zone, conjures the cloak to obscure from view the birth of Orlando's son. Distraction is privileged over attraction. ‘Look! Look!’ the narrator-biographer seems to urge the reader; take in the view of Kew – ‘Kew will do’ – at whose entry gates two lions, we learn just before this sentence, stand ‘couchant’ (O 215) as if to avert attention from the crowning head. Topographical entrances (the gates of Kew) and morphological exits (the birth canal) exchange furtive glances just before the cloak is, gauntlet-like, flung under the oak tree in flamboyant obscurantism. The rhyming play (kew/do; cloak/oak) conjures delay and delight; it soothes and lulls like a nursery rhyme while the kingfisher's flickage from ‘bank to bank’ rhythms uterine pulsations. Yet, on a deeper, more chthonic level, the playful language engages with what Gillian Beer calls the ‘anarchic neatness of rhyme [that] pins together the unlike’: in this instance, the uneasy, metaphorically commonplace, but, for the woman writer, paradoxical pairing of book and baby. Orlando's poem, ‘The Oak Tree’, and her son here have simultaneous, analogous births. The controlled anarchy of their doubling interrogates the tensile interrelationships between life and art for a transhistorical, transgendered woman who dares to joyously have it all.