It scared me and thrilled me, the quick spider,
a gentle light gray, like midnight midsummer
in Finland. It was unusually large
for this part of the world where spiders
tend to be smaller than a dime. But this
spider had long, elegant legs,
I carefully gathered it in tissue.
You belong out here, I said, as I walked it to the lawn.
Slow as you please, it let out a length of dragline silk
to dangle from my hand like a pendulum.
Two nights ago, I held in my arms a newborn girl,
eyelashes barely visible, little bubbles forming
between slightly parted lips, her eyes moving
in sleep. What could be in the dreams of a three-
day-old child? I cradled her head in one hand,
her whole body in the other, astonished by how
much preciousness fits in a being so small.
All around us, so many kinds of beautiful lives.
And inside us, so many invisible strands of astonishing
elasticity and tensile strength that weave us together
through the chaos, beauty to beauty to bittersweet beauty
to innocent beauty to unlikely beauty to beauty.