[stylist] Poem - "A Spider"

[William L Houts]

Hi Peeps,

Here's something I just dug up from one of my older, creakier poetry 
folders.  I wrote this sometime in my twenties, and I think it still 
works.  OH hell, why don't I just say it:  I'm in love with this poem 
and wouldn't edit it dfor a mint, LOL.  I've written a few poems about 
spiders, as I love the hideous little monsters somewhat, but this is 
probably the best.  Comments welcome, as always.


--Bill


---


Sprawled in my favorite chair,
I  found a spider striving down
my sweater's cotton roads;
uncruel, I meant to brush her
from my collar to the floor,
but a brainless finger crushed her.

Drunk on ideas the size of salt,
her witty legs, those marvelous legs
had skittered her down the wall

to vistas of heaving; the ebb
and flo of my breathing.

A ruined husk.  I didn't reckon
the difference between our lives,
the stellar gap between a spider's
life and mine:  and this was my task,
for if it exists, a reckoning spider is
truly a monster, a foe to be fought.

But she was no monster,
and I was only a man in a chair,
reading, with no ill intent:  and yet
that tiny walker died, a small
color in the world gone to gray

at my blameless finger's end.




















-- 
"Let's drink a toast now to who we really are."

           --Jane Siberry