Jane Alynn

House Spider             

She is small and lovely. A flower—
a downy nub of the garden,
bowl-shaped and squat,  
a little mottled rosette 
surrounded by slender spurs of being

who’s crawled inside
to scribble her web on the ledge
of my desk window.

Half-out, half-in
the strangely woven curtain
elaborately spun of threads and dust,
she’s rapt and waiting
like a medium
for her world to vibrate.

Between her tense readiness,                            
each sensor alert,           
and her streaking ascension
up the glass from time to time
to cast her body on a skittish fly
she keeps me company as I write.

Soon she succeeds
and I, as she with the fly, grasp
the twitching iridescence
of words, the hum
surrendering into silence.
No small triumph.


from Threads & Dust (Finishing Line Press)

Power Failure


When everything quit—
the clocks, lights, heat,
the evening news on t.v.

I wandered into the unlit
street to see the reason
for the sudden interruption.

There, under the powerline,
a great blue heron
lay, splayed and limp, 

feathers on bow-harp wings, singed,
her body made electric,
half-buried in the grassy ditch.

Mourners, bound by love
of a world missed, whispered,
not a dirge, but a verse

of indignation for the lack
of power, cut off like breath
caught in their throats.

Those hungry, waiting,
huddled in the dark,
saw only a cold black bag of night.

No one mentioned
the heron, or the stars,    
more luminous in a lightless sky.


from Threads & Dust (Finishing Line Press)

Living on the Flood Plain

Here, the mud—

    primordial stuff,
black as molten lava
that breaks through the thunderous surf,
insistent and boundless
as if a visitant power had charged our canvas
with brine-bitter darkness,

    could at any moment
in a lashing storm
spill over thick earthen walls, wales
made to save us,
and cover the valley with sludge.

Each winter,
in the deafening absence, the sound
of my own blood pounding, I pray
I’ll never see the hundred-year flood.
Then, a heron arrives
and, with the faith of a priest,
watches the bay with a glimmering eye.


from Threads & Dust (Finishing Line Press)

Starlings and the Cormorant

Not yet dawn
I walk in a soft rain
unprepared       
for the cloudburst
of starlings
that drop
from powerlines and houses
by the thousands
into a spruce tree;
their song, twittery and bright,              
is something miraculous—
Swelled from a few
once let loose
they sing with continual freedom,
no fear, no ambition,        
running the gamut naturally
in trills and tremolos,           
warbles in an unbroken litany.

And when I leave
the birdsong behind to return
to my quiet room, wondering
what to do with words,
I stand there in the darkness,
drenched, arms outstretched
like a cormorant drying her wings.
I try to hear, if there’s a voice,
what she would sing
but the silence is nearly perfect.


from Threads & Dust (Finishing Line Press)