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Posts Tagged ‘spider’

Living the Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 16, 2026| 5 Comments »


                  after listening to Ezekiel Fugate
 
 
This small gray spider
descends from the ceiling 
and stops right in front 
of my face—
I cannot say I love it,
but I still myself 
to honor this bulbous 
and elegant being
fourteen billion years
in the making who came
from the same cosmological
singularity out of which 
evolved acorns and
red squirrels and comets
and apples and my hand
and you, so, “hello,” I say,
as marvel stitches itself
into fear, and I stare 
as we both dangle there
on the thread of the moment, 
two characters in the one big story
arriving here together to meet 
whatever comes next.

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Entranced

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 15, 2026| 2 Comments »

 

 
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.

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Timing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 4, 2023| 11 Comments »

 
Today the heart has forgotten
how to ask questions
such as how do I serve—
instead, it scuttles like a spider
to the edges of the room,
looks for cracks to slip into and hide.
Today, it doesn’t feel safe to love.
It’s okay, I tell my scared heart.
It’s okay to slip away.
But come out again.
Everything depends on this.

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When She Was Afraid She Wasn’t Good Enough

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 26, 2023| 16 Comments »




When fear scuttled through her thoughts
with its eight slender legs; when she recognized
the shiny black body, the bulbous abdomen;
when fear found all her corners and began
to weave inside her mind a home of steel-strong silk;
she did not try to befriend the fear.
Nor did she try to squash it,
though she had a sturdy book.

Not that she wasn’t afraid. In fact,
fear seemed reasonable, if she threatened the fear first.
Instead, as if she were her own sweet child,
she took herself by the hand
and walked right up to the web to explore—
noted the upper structural threads,
the tangle threads in the middle,
the vertical threads in the bottom designed to trap.

Every day she walked back to the web
and stared wide-eyed at the fear hanging upside down,
and then she’d leave and wander
in other rooms where there was low-angled light
the way Renoir might have painted it,
or rooms of flowers, or rooms of song,
rooms of laughter, rooms of starlight,
warm rooms with nothing in them at all.

Eventually she could predict where the fear would be.
Could walk right to its brand new web.

We couldn’t say she liked the fear there.
We couldn’t say she didn’t miss it when it left.

We could say she found a way not to feed it.
We could say that while it lived in her,
she found a way to meet it.

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One Small Act

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 27, 2022| 6 Comments »


after watching hundreds killed in the thriller
I find a spider in my bathroom—
so gently I deliver it outside

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The Way the Spider Does

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 23, 2019| 2 Comments »

That is the way

I would like to meet the world,

my work both beautiful

and useful,

bringing into any

dark corner a lattice

for gathering light.

And though I may

be feared, hated, reviled,

still, I’d show up,

delicate and fierce,

I’d show up.

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On Walt Whitman’s 200th Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

When you wrote of the spider

launching through vacant space,

reeling from one sphere of meaning

 

to another, you didn’t know then

that you wrote that poem for me.

Two centuries later, this woman

 

reads about the bridges we are all

trying to form, and Walt, damned

if that wasn’t filament coming out

 

through your electric fingers.

 

 

 

https://poets.org/poem/noiseless-patient-spider

 

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Fear of What is Different

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 9, 2018| 2 Comments »

 

 

 

So beautiful,

this tiny red and white spider

I forget to shudder

and for a moment,

the war between want

and don’t want

is silenced.

It continues its journey

along the car door.

I walk away, slightly

more spider

than I was before.

 

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