Spider

Z—the fly is at the sill.

Z Z—I am silent, riding the center

Of my web, the intricacy of my thought

Spelled out like the stars and the bonds between them.

Z Z Z

My feet make no noise as I dance to the edge

Of my galaxy, this gossamer star-net that catches

The sun filtering gray through the window.

Here at the edge of the void through which

I extend myself, I listen to the fat

Stumbler, him of the single idea

That the glass will suddenly dissolve, the one

Who crawls upward on gluey feet and beats

Stubby wings until he plummets, his eyes

Rotating, twin red turrets. He tries

And sputters, tries and falls again. Satisfied,

I return to the tensile center, all my wits

Sharpened to wait. For have I not written

Out my thoughts to the gods?—I who fell

From heaven on a single strand,

Unraveling my guts, and found this eminence

To attach to, and then that, and then that

In the void, in the whispering chaos

And, groundless, swung myself through the night,

Launched out on the rope of myself to meet

The other like an echo of myself,

Trailing the strong cord of my being

In parallel hexagonals until

The pattern of my soul was laid out. Then

The great square of day shone dim as the white

Eye of the sun climbed up and I saw

The beautiful design

Of myself flex silver in all directions.

The small gnats fly to it in admiration

And sing, fascinated, as I weave them into it

And drink their song, my hunger slightly abated.

Now I await this black-booted fellow.

This drab swashbuckler thick with the dust

Of his fellows who failed before him.

This worn-out singer of song who turns

One eye backward in fear, one forward in desire,

Who thinks there is a world outside the glass

Of color and open spaces, tired of

My twilit world where things silver with thought

And grow dry. Let him bluster and crawl.

Soon now, in his last careering search

For a way out of the dark he’ll find my net,

A shimmer of moonlight sticking to his wings,

A deadly, impossible music that catches

Him in mid-air, a symphony that wraps

Him round though he saw at it frantically

With his violin until it silence him—

Until he hangs, a note like the others

In this universal score I have composed,

My choral symphony, to which I’ve offered up

His small soul in gratitude, that it might swell

Larger, expanding into this darkness— 

Until he hangs, a shell as weightless

As if he’d gone through the glass, transfigured

Into the endless contemplation of my being.

Into my very self, another burned-out satellite,

A dead star. Meanwhile I sit

All night at the center,

Filled with a sweet surfeit of being.

My feet sensitive to each wave and vibration

Along its radii, listening for news

Of life at the far-flung edges.

—Robert Siegel