A gentle feeling
Long forgot
Looked up and op'ed its eyes
Like violets when they see a spot
Of summer in the skies

The honeybee delights in her perch
Crooning ageless songs to the tussore silk petals
A low thrum in the sweet saffron ****
A brush of honey around her entrance
She is the fae
Moth, too
Stumbling to reach the pendulous light in a drunken merriment
Dancing shadows over dry walls
A thin imitation of butterfly
Who is fae, too
Centipede and silverfish
Body full of a thousand darting eyes
Cautious, careful, carried
On the tips of toddler's fingers
Crawling, cradled
In the impregnable hands of a careless child
Wingbeats like a dreary applause
In the dew-soaked trellis
The labyrinth of gossamer thread
Arachne is prideful.
Escape, escape,
There is a minute sound of a spider weeping
Dry, Like sand through an hourglass
As she wraps the children in viscid cloth
Drier still are the ghosts crackling as tiny feet
Navigate the cicada grave
Skin grows tighter and tighter
Summer is over now

A deep, verdant green
shy stems and ivy cloaked in the penumbra of half-lidded eyes
Leaving even the daisies
Trembling in the shame of their own viridity

Aching for the sun's touch
I trace my own hand in the quiet night
To feel that again

the high priestess sits still
on her throne  
her mottled hands beginning to sprout veins
Like the roots of an ageless tree
her eyes sinking low to the earth, lids heavy with sleep
the abstract temple, mismatched in quilted sheets and mangled ceramic fragments
encompassing her victims, the children brothers Romulus and Remus
who play under a drizzled chorus of shattered glass
and winter hesitates as she raises her roots to a flame of Hell
fuels the pyre with white snakeroot and , suckling from the Jack-in the pulpit
feeds the ashen embers once again

A gentle feeling
Long forgot
Looked up and op'ed its eyes
Like violets when they see a spot
Of summer in the skies