Medusa Bathing in Winter

By the tea roses, where dainty whiteness grows,
two stone plates and knives,
await a company
long past due.

Here, where the shore is long
and one can lose omniscience
when they look along
those sheer cliff walls,
fabled figures hide from their own stories
in corners of the world grown silent.

Fragmented rumors click and unclick
behind a wall of mist. 
Spider mums unfurl in the steam
rising off the bath water.

Underneath a fading fresco
of a garden full of birds,
vines grow over crumbling images of vines underneath.

A woman of familiar beauty
walks through the damp decay.
She alone feels the fine stone dust
beneath her toes.
She, with fatal eyes,
who watches everything, awaiting its demise,
surveys her wild courtyard, lost to winter,
and is comforted by frozen stars.

A seabird pecks at an ornamental tern
perched over the salty water.
It stiffens in the breeze.
From within the mists comes the faint hiss of steam
and the steady drip of wax;
the dull thud of a petal hitting the floor,
as she steps softly into this world.