They Live With Us

For the second year

in a row, a large speckle-legged
spider has anchored a silken thread
on a rain gutter,

and built a languid, relaxed
web anchored below
to a rosemary bush in front
of a large window. She's

an orb-wearver spider--
Neoscona crucifera--found
everywhee around this country.
I like to sit in a chair by the glass
and watch her. She usually perches

somewhere near the central
orb of web, plump and still,
but sometimes plucking silk
like a harpist. Yesterday,

I saw that she had built a snug,
velvety pale egg-sac. A little
purse. She touched it up
like a painter or sculptor.
Fussing with it. What does
she see when she does that?

Later, she'll lay about 1, 000
eggs in it, and it will drop
off the web into the bush,
maybe down into dirt.

She lives with us, and
we, with her. The same
can be said of so many
splendid creatures.

hans ostrom 2024

Summer Theater

As a bulbous puce spider

sits still in its web waiting
for an insect to stick,
a butterfly bounds through
sunshine, alights to sip water
from a deep green wet leaf.

Bees maul lavendar blossoms.
An iridescent blue dragonfly
cruises by & a hummingbird
pulls up & parks mid-air
to sip nectar from a fire-red
crocosmia flower. Crows

sit on wires, roofs, and branches,
silently picking mites from feathers.
Summer theater, quite show--
I'm glad to see and know it.

hans ostrom 2024

Orb Spider In Its Nest

I saw a a dark, spotted

orb-weaver spider
suspended in the center
of its flat, woven net,
presiding over its life.

I leaned in and spoke
softly to it. The spider slowly
raised its two foremost
legs--a casual double-wave.

Like moonlight glowing
on an old eucalyptus tree,
like an unsheltered man
sleeping on a city grate,

the spider and its awareness
cannot affect the future.
They're almost nothing,
just like me. And yet the
spider and the man and
the glowing tree, and just one

night's moonlight should
count as crucial. They exist
& their gestures suggest we
should care.

hans ostrom 2023

Photo: spotted orb-weaver spider. © Oct

Becoming a Spider

Maybe I'll turn
into a spider
at the end
and follow
the silk filament
up and up
all the way
into the clearest
sunny sky
I've seen
since childhood.


hans ostrom 2020

Cicadas and Spider

A cicadian chorus sings
in my circadian sleep. In a dream
I weep and laugh and weep
a little more. I knock on a door.

Who opens it is a spider playing
four violins. "Why, come in,"
says the spider. "You're just in time."
"For what?" I ask.

"For to be yourself, to tap a drum,
to have some have some have
some fun." That's what's left
us in the the end: a chance
at fun, and then . . . .


hans ostrom 2020

Transformation: Doctor

When I visit a physician, I become a martyr,
forced to wear a backless tunic. Large white
spiders crawl all over my body, touching,
probing, tapping. Then flies swarm
around my head, each with a number painted
on its back. Then the needles. At last
I'm sent down into a dungeon of potions
and sacrificed to constant worry.


hans ostrom 2016

"Now That Phones Are With Them," by Hans Ostrom

 ("Is this a good time to call?" --Old Saying)


Now that phones are with them,
everywhere and always,
it is always
and never a good time to call. Life,
a series of interruptions,
has become a shattered series

of interrupted, re-continued,
dis-directed ruptures. Like
a batty princess to a frog,
people speak loudly at something
in their palms.  Confused
courtiers look on.

One hand's fingers
tap like spiders' legs
on plasti-glass surfaces.
Apps become vats
into which to pour
attention. Heads bent,

faces slack, eyes distracted:
people's minds leave their
bodies to go to that other space,
that cloud which is forever
and presently calling.


--hans ostrom 2014

Fall's Always Good for a Laugh

A large, allegedly evolved primate,

he passed through an exterior door

of his abode, intending to gather

a newspaper on the stoop (this

was in the last days of print-culture),

and he was caught in a spider’s web.

Webbing on his face, he looked

at the fat brown spider as it danced

like a portly Vaudevillian on its

filament, and he laughed.


hans ostrom 2013

Spiders and Company Want Inside

In the Pacific Northwest--and most of the Northern Hemisphere, I assume--this is the season when lots of small creatures want to get inside humans' abode.  Spiders construct webs near doorways, and they may be found trying to get inside through cracks.  The same goes for earwigs. Field-mice, too. And wee beetles.


So I'm re-posting a poem from Fall 2007:

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.

Here Come the Spiders

My wife saw a large spider in the bathroom.

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.