Green wood with fissures of black and a quiet creaking, as with glass or ice in frightful cold. Dark clouds roll overhead. There is a quickening; a fluttering spin of light. It twists relentlessly around itself and then loses it’s grip momentarily. It flirts, teases and licks, touches and grabs and pulls away. It sings in high whistles, adding it’s own pitch to those of the black crickets whose disembodied voices choir the heat. It’s hue moves from muted oranges into peals of yellow with veins of indigo. The heart of it throbs steadily.

This is the mirror of moods, grabbing, tugging, spinning frantically and then dying back, the shades of the blood under skin at a word, at a touch, at a taste, at a thought. I am the whipping spiral of that flame, a hurricane hurried by the tempests around it, dying back into and spreading out from a heart of glowing heat. This center hums constantly with anxiety and longing and also with the burn of hunger, and a trembling that betrays vulnerability.

It is the invisible made visible, the way debris and dirt will reveal the funnel of a cyclone, the spiral of friction that gives shape to my bones and blood and the cells within. It is the spiral that plays in the center of my sex. It is the arch of Pegasus’ neck, flickering up into my naked eyes, rearing and tonging out of itself, stretched by invisible winds and then dipping back to it’s own centrifuge. I think of the sun.