The Garden Spider
Judith Goldhaber
Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse 2009 (view all the winners)
Most Highly Commended
The common garden spider (Araneus diadematus) constructs its web just before sunrise...The web is started with a horizontal thread stretched between two supports. The spider lets out a thread that is carried to another support by a breeze or air current.
-Newsletter of the Seattle Rose Society
i.
The first step is a drop into the void.
The thin thread, drifting on a fickle breeze
sways to and fro, now borne to earth, now buoyed
by warmer air, it rises toward the trees.
A spider could live well there, could avoid
the gardener's hat, the clumsy blundering bees,
and other lurking dangers that might seize
her fragile world of silken trapezoids.
But now the thread hangs slack: the breeze has died;
a leaf lets go, and in its silent wake
the silken fiber shudders like a snake
tossing its silver coils from side to side,
then catches on a poplar twig, and holds.
The die is cast, the future now unfolds.
ii.
The sudden jerk, the thwack! of destiny,
appears to hit her just below the belt;
Until this moment life has never dealt
so strong a blow, such thrilling urgency.
Last spring's adventureówhen she'd struggled free,
shedding the packed cocoon in which she dwelt
with her six hundred sistersóthat, she felt,
was nothing next to this necessity.
Just suck it up! an inner voice commands
(a voice well known to arachnidae and men)
And so she does: the spinnerets (small glands
located on the creature's abdomen)
contract in violent spasm; the silken skein
grows taut, grows strong, becomes her iron chain.
iii.
This second crossing, nothing like the first:
The distance now a measured quantity,
measured in dew dropsóseven hundred three
from starting point to anchor point, traversed
delicate leg by leg, remembered and rehearsed.
And yet the spider, knowing well that she
must find the center (or, more accurately,
create the center) of this universe,
launches her tender body on the air
and dangles freely like a juicy fly
a tasty treat for any passerbyó
robin or toad or lizardóprowling there:
all this to trace a pattern on the sky
shaped like a word she cannot utter: Why?
iv.
At the exact center of her world-to-be
she rests until the trembling subsides;
then shakes herself and climbs back up, astride
one filament, a new one falling free.
She knows her private domesticity
hangs from the girders of the world outside,
so, like a timid but determined bride,
she ventures out to the community.
Poor eyesight and a clumsy, stumbling gait
impede her progress down the poplar's trunk;
you'd take her for an ordinary drunk
save that the loveliness which she creates
proclaims her artist, poet, Apollo,
worthy to feast with Michelangelo.
v.
Seen from close up, the path is always straight:
a simple step between two radii.
She reaches for a foothold that's nearby,
touches it once to help her navigate;
the elegant legs contract and elongate
while gripping tightly to the strands that lie
on either sideóthis M.O. could apply
to any journey, on two legs or eight.
But something curious seems to complicate
her linear path: before one's puzzled eyes
a complex spiral, subtle and ornate,
emerges as by magic. It testifies
to views professor Einstein would endorse:
topography, not intention, sets the course.
vi.
First light is showing just perceptibly
as she sets out upon the journey back.
Beginning at the web's periphery
she lays a different kind of spiral track,
trailing a thread of lush viscosity.
Two busy legs stretch out the silk and tack
it firmly to successive radii;
meanwhile, two other pair take up the slack,
kneading and polishing the sticky thread
to strengthen it. The fourth pair cuts away
the older spiral, leaving in its stead
this sun-bedazzled jewel to greet the day:
Apollo, rising, blesses her: Salue!
Orb weaver, goddess of October dew!
vii.
When chatting with her mathematical friends
(Euclid or Thales or Pythagoras)
in that empyrean of eternal bliss
to which arachnidae and men ascend,
some spiders have been known to condescend
so far as to forget their differences
and in the course of reminiscences
let slip much more than prudence recommends
concerning the abstruse geometry
of logarithmic spirals, convex sets,
and choices at successive vertices.
A silence falls: Pythagoras forgets
his mystic teachings, stung by jealousy:
O, for eight legs, and silk, and spinnerets!
