Queen of My Heart

An orb weaver strung an impossible web between the sky and the wind, between two trees for the night. She’d done the radials when we first saw her and was working on the wheel. She had three or four lines dancing around the outside already. 

'Oh look, she’s got lots of babies!' I said.

But he replied that they weren't babies and he was right; she was capturing midgies, tiny black prey dotted around the outside of her new web.

I walked under the web to see it from the other side, up against the gunbarrel sky. I blundered into one of her main support struts and watched dismayed as the whole construction caved in on itself. The orb weaver frantically tried to restrain and rebuild the flailing threads of her home before the sun went down.

Oh come then and rove

To the seas or the grove,

When the moon is rising bright

And I'll whisper there

In the cool night air

What I dare not to - in broad daylight.

What do you do with a one who hands you candied sweets so laced with desire and carnage? And what was Percy Shelly really up to, while his wife was writing Frankenstein?

‘I’m weaning myself,’ I  said to my friend, in the days, weeks, before he sent me that poem. She was both impressed and  doubtful with my resolution. She knows me. She is a good friend.

Weaned? I must be hauled away by oxen and tied to a stake on a foreign beach, burned alive and my smoldering organs set out for the brindle dogs to fight over, before I would leave. Here lies a woman boarded by pirates, set alight and burned to the waterline, before she would be weaned.

I keep thinking about that spider. When I wandered into her web, I was both oblivious and hyper aware of the cornerstones that she had built, rebuilt and repaired. From the peppermint trees to the cobweb to where the rain fell on hot gravel, he and I walked away thoughtless and innocent, hand in hand like exiles from the garden.

Queen of my Heart
Percy Byshe Shelley.

Bastard