thorns and phoenix eggs

Who is this, who reaches out a tentacled arm toward the land of hours and days?



It is Rosa multiflora, an invincible, impenetrable advancing fairy force, radiant in raindrops.



Thorns beside each jewel. You will not meet it without bleeding. It is a red-stemmed plant.



And elsewhere in this otherworldly tangle, a phoenix egg. The phoenix: it lives five hundred years a day, then builds itself a flaming pyre that consumes it, leaving behind a golden egg, from which hatches, the next morning, a new p...