Kathryn Jacobs

Flying Buttresses

I want to shelter under Gothic wings
with blue-gray feather-ceilings. Tucked away
in flutter-chapels full of whisper-sounds

that make you think of herons, upsurging.
Because they’re so outrageous. The cachet
of over-arching pinions that surround

a vaulted pocket I could huddle in.
Like flying buttresses that elbow up
until they’re posing, while fat filaments

drip feathers indolently, tapering.
To hang there (poised) in an inverted cup
they almost, not-quite touch. I’ve stood in front

of fine cathedrals, awestruck. But not this:
a church-winged heron, rising in the mist.

Kathryn Jacobs is author of the poetry collection In Transit (David Robert Books, 2011), as well as three chapbooks (Advice Column, Signs of Our Time, and Signs and Portents). She has published over 150 poems in a wide variety of journals from New Formalist to Measure, Shattercolors, Snakeskin, Whiskey Island, Xavier Review, Acumen, Slant, etc., as well as previously here at Loch Raven Review, several times. She is a professor at Texas A & M – C in Commerce, Texas, and has, she tells us, “two daughters in Chicago, and a son I lost in 2005 (at 18). I am also divorced and (soon) remarried. Life is complicated.”