The Spider

Have you ever watched a spider
devour something in its web,
wondering if you should do something to stop it?
Or if your idleness, your languishing,
sitting on a creaking porch swing, watching, hoping that what it eats
is not a lightning bug,
rather it’s a fly, or a wasp, or a beetle, some other unfavorable and insignificant thing to you,
something that deserves it,
is a blackmark upon your character.

And that you are a simple do-nothing
who would use the excuse that it is nature
and no cause of yours to intervene against the spider
on behalf of that which it has caught, however innocent.
We either catch or we are caught,
the nature of things.
There is no such thing as mutuality, she slurs.
She quotes Marilyn Monroe and curses more than she doesn’t.
She’s drunk more than she is sober.
I believe only in life and death, she reasons.

The spider must eat, after all,
just as you must eat and have eaten.
And you brooming webs,
swatting them into the rosebushes
just to have them do it all over,
may lead them to starve or cause them undue harm,
a burden you’ve no right to impose
for it’s a burden you wouldn’t wish yourself to bear.

You even cajole yourself with the fact
that they eat mosquitoes,
almost as though they do it as a favor to you.
You make a case for spiders
because you are indolent more than you are benevolent.

But all it would take is one simple sweep
of the broom.
One simple sweep to spare a life.
What if it were you in that web
depending upon the charity of a do-good stranger
to rescue you from death.
From being devoured.
Chewed alive and slurped up, I presume.
Struggling in the web beforehand,
seeing the ominous shadow of the lurking behemoth
that will consume you, at its leisure.
A death much too soon.

I may rock some more,
look away some more,
dawdle as though not cognizant, a lie I tell myself.
Blame the blameless bug for its own tribulation,
all the while, hoping it’s never me.
An endless job it would be to sweep those webs, I consider.
And who am I to impose my virtues upon someone or something else?
Risking one falling in my hair, my shirt.
Carrying it inside unwittingly.

I might wake up and find myself
tangled in such a web,
the price of my good deed.
The spider grown the size of me,
slowly crawling towards me,
all because I decided to sweep webs.
To intercede against the natural order
and nose in the affairs of things
not of my concern.

The crickets and other night bugs
lucky not to be in webs,
sing in the black wet grass,
in the hot throat of night.
I once thought they sang pleasant songs.
Now I know otherwise.
They sing mournful songs of death because that is what night is.
It is death in its natural state, awoken.
Day is life, and it too sleeps.

Laying lazily on my porch swing,
these old bones. Me. Still as the spider itself.
Watching it in the web move over
the body of that unfortunate paralyzed bug.
Then she comes.
Not looking up to notice.
I should have nightmares of it.
I should carry some guilt.
But rather, I go to bed and she moves over me.

My quarrel isn’t with you, dear spider,
harbinger of death.
It is with your master.
He who stalks me as you stalk it.
He who I might think I can sweep away with a broom
but who crawls towards me ever still
to suck the life from me
night after night, at her leisure.
A death much too soon.

I write this of you. To you.
Neither to compel or move you,
but to consider you and me.
I am the only person ever to write you,
of your crystal-threaded web,
your toils in the nooks and shadows of my humble porch.
Your comings and goings.
Of your sinister doom.
Your minacious being.
I tally your many defects against you.
Your selfish sins.
You’re no Charlotte.
Ain’t no God that made you.
You’ve crawled out of a death sack.

Your defects are in lethargy, she returns.
An abysmal lack of ambition.
The want of nothing more than a porch swing.
Spinning no web, yet expecting to be fulfilled.
She has spider webs in her eyes, I notice.
The irises, they are as those on the porch, waiting,
expecting to catch something. 

Her pupils are the spider,
black with ready legs that distend thereof.

I once spun webs and toiled in them as you do,
left bodies disemboweled.
Lifeless skins that blow away in time.
But now I’m the bereft bug
you devour without consideration.
Are you trying to break my heart, to frighten me?
Is that why you’ve come as a woman?
She quotes Marilyn again.
Something I’ve heard fifty times like gospel.
Indicts the Kennedy’s. Tells me of the night she died.
But I yawn in my disinterest.

I wake from the nightmarish drunk sleep
to the civility of morning.
She’s gone without the bother of a note,
or a goodbye.
I've traded loving women for a succession of loveless spiders.
For the fading scent on a pillow. Dreadful Marilyn quotes.
Vapors of a whore in a hallway
and my body left tangled in the threads of worn sheets.

Out on the porch, I find in the hangover of sunlit webs
that the bug I eulogized so profoundly was a japanese beetle.
I stand there skinned of all ethics.
A silver, shriveled, hollowed shell is all that’s left of it.
Somehow, I am relieved
for it is the beetles that ate my roses.

So further introspection isn’t warranted
until evening
when the spider expectantly appears again.
I find it easier to sweep away empty webs of shucked bugs
than those full of eyes and legs.
What is swept away, again and again,
only returns to be caught,
or comes to catch what it can catch so that it may eat.
It’s the natural way of things, she says.
The price we all must pay.

A death much too soon, I return.
I've always believed in more than life and death.
She laughs as she gets undressed again.