Oh razzle me, dazzle me with your fireworks. Don't you know you're beautiful, everyone of you? The words in ether, a dream to remember, the laughter no one else hears. What medium channels the distance into focus. Smaller than a fish scale, small iridescent sickle of a rainbow; larger than a sun flare, to change the tides within us.

When he has been riding his bicycle fast through the cold morning dewy air and his mouth is cold and tastes like sweet crisp apples that's when I like kissing him best. We fell in love in the fall. The briskness to the air reminds me of scratchy wool blankets and sitting beneath big trees in the arboretum, watching red leaves spiral and spin, talking one step at a time. This year the leaves are turning a full month early, and there has been no dry late summer heat. The grass never died down to straw this year and now I hear geese flying, under the wet dark clouds, in the hushed early morning, which is not so early as it was. The days dawn later and close earlier, lamps burning inside windows.


We have had a large wolf spider in a web near our door. We've watched her grow and grow, and eat moths and mosquitoes. Yesterday she looked twice the size, and upon looking closer I realized she had a suitor inside her funnel with her, a small love nest, limbs entwined. This morning the paler, smaller, half-eaten carcass of the male spider, mostly his legs, was pushed to the farthest reaches of her web, used and discarded.

We stood quietly for a moment and then S said, well, he got what he wanted.