House Spiders
Judith Vollmer
Streetlights out again I'm walking in the dark
lugging groceries up the steps to the porch
whose yellow bulb is about to go too, when a single
familiar strand intersects my face,
the filament slides across my glasses which seem suddenly
perfectly clean, fresh, and my whole tired day slows down
walking into such a giant thread
is a surprise every time,
though I never kill them, I carry them outside
on plastic lids or open books, they live
so plainly and eat the mosquitoes.
Distant cousins
to the scorpion, mine are pale & small,
dark & discreet. More like the one
who lived in the corner of the old farm kitchen
under the ivy vase and behind the single
candle-pot--black with curved
crotchety legs.
Maya, weaver of illusions,
how is it we trust the web, the nest,
the roof over our heads, we trust the stars
our guardians who gave us our alphabet?
We trust the turtle's shell because
it, too, says house and how can we read
the footprints of birds on shoreline sand,
& October twigs that fall to the ground
in patterns that match the shell & stars?
I feel less and less like
a single self, more like
a weaver, myself, spelling out
formulae from what's given
and from words.
The weather is finally acting like fall should. It turned cold and rainy overnight. I have a new friend from Germany that cannot understand our weather. It's raining or snowing one minute, then the next, it's clear skies and the sun is shining hotly. The weather here is changeable, on a hour to hour basis.
Now that the weather has made up its mind to be consistently cold, the spiders are migrating inside. I feel ambivalent about spiders. I like their role in mythology, and the part they play in the ecosystem, but, I just don't want them where I have to see them. I used to have a spider that insisted on camping out in the lamp by my bed. I moved it, and its thread several times to a more tolerable location, (for me). But it, or another, would return. I finally took it outside. I have a few that have made permanent residence in the laundry nook window amid my succulents and Mary statues.
Reading Vollmer's poem, I was surprised to find spiders are distant cousins of scorpions. Isn't it just fantastic when a poem teaches you something new? And also, poems that ask us to look again at what we think: stars are constant, and form a kind of roof. I have a shelter in which I house my collection of treasures. I live there with my child and husband, two dogs, one cat, and I imagine a host of spiders and other unseen entities. I've always thought of myself as fiercely independent, and I think this may be true, but maybe only in my thoughts. In reality, I am interdependent, dependent, and depended on, like the speaker in the poem, a weaver, using whatever life gives to create my fragile, silk strand world.
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