-another poem of ecstasy-

I can't say with conviction that the spider

is not a beautiful creature.

It’s both of us who live in the world,

me, upstairs in my house of wood, drywall and glass,
she, upon a strung web of silk in the basement where

the old treasures lie boxed and draped under bedsheets

to languish in the dank purgatory between usefulness and uselessness.

the spider’s web dances there in the current of air

pulsating from the bulkhead in the deepest recess of the corner

above the sump pump where it glistens in a stream of sunlight.

when the sunlight passes, the light of the Moon will slip

through the spaces at the bulkhead and linger.

this is the time when its silk makes its move toward rare beauty.

sometimes, when I'm down there, I'll get close enough
that my breathing disturbs her web as she waits unafraid

upon the architecture of her making.

It's me alone who can tell her story. 

she has an instinct of her own, an instinct to remain silent.

In time, she finds her way upward into the living quarters of the house

leaving the web of neatly cocooned, bloodless moths and flies behind,

crawling into openings and dark fissures devouring what she finds on the march

regardless of kinship, coming to rest upon an interior wall near the ceiling

over the hanging photograph of my young father in 1942, posed for the camera,

looking sharp in bootcamp issue khakis which is where I’ll kill her.