Claire Keyes
is the author of The Question of Rapture, a book of poems published in 2008 by Mayapple Press in Michigan.
Professor Emerita at Salem State College, where she taught English for thirty years, she has also written The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, newly published in paperback in 2009 by the University of Georgia Press.
Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, The Valparaiso Review, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others.
She is a resident of Marblehead, Massachusetts.
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Silken Tents
Come August, scruffy white shrouds
appear on our birches like fake cobwebs
draped over hedges.
Only these are real:
the onset of fall webworms.
I dither about macabre cocoons.
Of course, no birds will land.
Not for them that sticky netting.
Blame the birches: how could webworms
resist their slender green shapes,
their copious leaves a summer’s banquet.
Nature is slovenly
in spawning moths, offering our trees
for their dismal feast, impossible
to halt.
We die a little each day.
Lest we forget, nature sends moths, worms,
boils, tumors.
When it starts to drizzle
we move inside, the hokey mirror
pinned on the wall receiving our images:
Look sharp! we’re cautioned
as over our shoulders, the wind snaps
the trees and the silken tents shiver.
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