Arachne

This one comes spying, prying, interrupts me—I must weave, so ply my words in running streams—None can speak with me, by her decree I continue ceaseless, only the cold king’s voice can freeze my flow with his (I’ll whisper it) clod’s requests—He makes my tarsi wrists, claws spread fingertips, and turns my web to patterned silk, insists my designs milk his empty mind’s obsessive greed for that sad prisoner that was a girl, before he took her, pleading—I would see him punished! You ask how, with what? I stitch her dead fruit’s ruby drops, falling like blood to ash along her sash, calling her mother’s breath to barren smother’s tears—I hide such taunts in my forty-fingered flaunt of thread’s flow directly under his bony nose! (Shhhhhhhh!)—He wraps her in my spider’s tug, cocoons her love, hangs her here on her throne. I’m but a creature, too clever at my skill for that (I’ll hiss it) wisest of spinners, the scowling owl’s hoot is a snake at your boot—Now I am called away in overstated poems, paintings, lays and tapestries, into my old clumsiness in which she conflated her immortal talents with my mortal art (and lost!)—Look at me, chatting with poets, ages hence, while she marches about in her silly attic hat, all martial, proud, clutches her spear and shield, flatters herself that you still burn a hecatomb or two in supplication, foolish, vain, insistent wench—(Shhhhhhhh!)—But she’ll not venture here without pretense of punishment, though I must stretch indentured speech that like new fabric weaves its play with yours—I must be off, my web, it hums to me. You hear it? Off-key, breached again by some stale gust I cannot see that tears it, my artful life’s work, such mastery spun endlessly in my triumphant weaves!

John A. deSouza‘s recent work has appeared/will appear in Willows Wept Review The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Muse Pie/Shot Glass Journal, Finishing Line Press/Paddock Review, Grey Sparrow Review and others. He is the author of Hidden, a sequence of poems addressing the war in Ukraine, (Bottlecap Press, 2025).

A Song for John