The Weavers

As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sun will return before the rain has altogether stopped and through this lightest of curtains the curve of it shines with a thousand inclinations and so close is the one to the one adjacent that you cannot tell where magenta for instance begins and where the all-but-magenta has ended and yet you’d never mistake the blues for red, so these two, the girl and the goddess, with their earth-bred, grass- fed, kettle-dyed wools, devised on their looms transitions so subtle no hand could trace nor eye discern their increments, yet the stories they told were perfectly clear. The gods in their heaven, the one proposed. The gods in heat, said the other. And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown, fins and hooves, their shepherds’ crooks and pizzles. Till mingling with their darlings-for-a-day they made a progeny so motley it defied all sorting-out. It wasn’t the boasting brought Arachne all her sorrow nor even the knowing her craft so well. Once true and twice attested. It was simply the logic she’d already taught us how to read.