AH, SPIDER

This is one of the poems from the new book, Feeling My Way Along, available on Amazon Dec. 20, 2024 (pre-orders available now). This poem began out of my fascination with the huge yellow-and-black garden spiders I would see at my husband’s ranch in Central Texas. Their circular webs could be as much as two feet in diameter, often connecting one bush to another, and were amazing feats of engineering. Yet they all started with a single thread. The Central Texas Writer’s Society published “AH, SPIDER” in its 2021 anthology.

Ah, Spider.
You’ve toiled the night away
to block my path
into the garden.

Dawn’s sleepy fingers
caress your gossamer lace
and turn your dewdrop diamonds
into a thousand tiny mirrors
in which I see

that I’m a spider, too,
weaving fences made of fear
to keep out hurt and harm,
silken walls
around the garden
of promise
and risk.

Ah, Spider.
Your handiwork
seduces me,
its hypnotic, lulling sway,
bringing thoughts
of habit’s easy hammock,
its swinging cradle safe
from challenge
and its rigors.
And its terrors.
And its throbbing life.
All waiting
in Eden’s Garden
of promise
and risk.

Ah, Spider,
with your mirrors to my soul.
You see the reels of ferris wheels
I spin in safe monotony.

If I would spin, instead,
one silken thread
into deep, uncharted space,
on what stars could I leave
a silken trace?

Why do I weave, then,
fear’s enslaving noose,
while time chips away,
minute by merciless minute,
at life deprived
of daring’s rich vitality?

Ah, spider,
the sun now burns its way
to the new dawn’s edge
where hidden Future waits,
and dew’s bright diamonds dry to dust.

But if I brush aside
your toilspun net
you’ll call on me,
mirror to my soul,
to break my web of comfort,
choking, sweet,
and enter Eden’s Garden
of promise
and risk

to walk a path
unseeable
toward a Me
unknowable.

Ah, Spider.
All must spend
Time’s golden coin.
But you swing out
alone,
hanging over emptiness
with naught but faith and fragile thread,
to spin primeval knowledge
of deep-hid secrets,
while I stay strapped in fear’s cold harness,
weaving safety’s net
in numbing
endlessness.

Ah, Spider,
maker of bejeweled mantle,
with its mirrors to my Soul.
Wrapped in your cloak of courage,
could I live with the stranger
that I would be
if I entered Eden’s Garden
of promise
and risk?

Ah, Spider.