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.