It's September, so many spiders are on the move, going--I assume--for more warmth, heading inside "our" abodes, which they think of as space to be shared; into garages, sheds, and woodpiles.
I almost never murder spiders. Usually I just leave them alone, and after a while they're not where they were. Sometimes I get a piece of cardboard, induce the spider to climb aboard, and take the spider outside.
All spiders look intricate; most spiders look menacing, at least to the common-folk like me. Upon further study, they seem either inordinately calm or astonishingly hard-working, artistic, and busy.
Once or twice I've had the privilege of seeing hundreds of tiny spiders burst forth from eggs in a spider's nest. Amazing. Like a little teeming city of commuters coming to life out of nowhere. I wonder what percentage of them become adult spiders.
I wish I knew more about that which allows spiders intuitively to measure the spaces of a web as they build it. A metaphysical question: Can spiders' webs be considered art? Maybe it's simply a definitional question.
Not that it matters, but I don't really like the Spiderman movies. In fact, I think I've seen only the first one. It's nothing personal. I just think the premise is kind of dumb. I think I'd rather he really turn into a spider, the way the fellow actually turns into a fly in The Fly. But then he wouldn't be spider-man, I guess. He'd be Spiderspider.
A poem, then, for September and for spiders on the move:
Spiders’ Migration
Northern Hemisphere, September: spiders
come inside. They slip through seams
to here, where summer seems to them
to spend the winter. Their digits tap out
code on hardwood floors. They rappel
from ceilings on out-spooled filaments
of mucous, measuring the place. Sometimes
they stay just still. Paused. Poised.
It’s not as if spiders wait for us
to watch them, or even as if they
wait. Rather, octavian motion
is so easy, syncopated, and several
that stillness surely exhilarates spiders
just arriving from the Northern Hemisphere.
It’s time for us to enter equal days and
equal nights, to pluck the filament between
fear of and fascination with spiders
moving in.
Hans Ostrom. Copyright 2007.
1 comment:
Hans, the spiders aren't where they were because they've found a home somewhere in yours! Seriously, I ignored a silverfish in a hotel room once and the next thing I knew, it was in bed with me.
I've been hearing from my students about spiders--they see them in the dorms a lot. I had a spider crawling up my pants leg the other morning. The shock made me spill coffee all over my blouse. I appreciate your poem, though.
So did y'all kill the spider in the shower?
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