WOLF SPIDER
Katherine
Hastings
Cover photo by the author
20 pages,
hand-sewn
Sebastopol,
2005
October
30
Leaves fall
like rain, turn
the black
earth gold.
Dead, we say, but the wind
in her many
wooden shoes
keeps up
the crackling dance.
The wind
slants from the west,
breasts its
way through broken
fences and
windowpanes,
billows
life into needles
and
abandoned webs,
a prayer
within their stitching.
Over the
mountain the moon
wears black
lace, throws it off
only to
disappear. On my skin
your silver
hands paint rivers
of
colliding stars.
From the
light pole golden hills,
jagged rip
of shifting ground,
cloudless
streams, earthbreath
palpitating
discarded leaves,
four
black-tailed deer
chewing,
slowly,
rose blossoms, blooms
of agapanthus.
Plumes rise ghost-like
from chimney pipes,
lick cerulean sky —
delicious space flesh.
No prayer from love or loss,
(he’s just a crow)
only stillness,
that final
sequin of star
each dawn
he opens his mouth to,
he calls to,
lifting heavenward.
Moonrise
The fog lying in over the mountains
is black. Is lined with ice.
Is its own
mountain of snow.
Ten p.m. One planet to the southwest
shimmers copper and rose. The mockingbird
is silent as the night
lights up like day and the moon asks
who is braver.
We are small and so is every
quandary.
By the time we walk indoors we are
at peace
again. Not much else matters.
That and knowing the end will not be
so bad,
that there is no difference, really,
between
one shroud and the next,
be it mist, or veil or shadow. When we are tangled
in moon and meadow, a season of
drowning
in
light. Violet. Green. Silver.