-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.