Spider - Feb 9 2021

 

Spider

Feb 9 2021

The cobweb

flexes with the wind,

suspended

on clever gossamer threads

that elastically stretch

from the thin green branches

that tether it down.

Spider silk

spun at will

and preposterously strong.

It walks on water

like impenetrable glass.

Then raises two legs

and sails across the shallow pond,

as if the mirrored surface

were frictionless.

Or casts a strand to the air,

surrendering to the wind

as it takes flight.

Gravity does not apply

if you're small enough.

And the fantastic silk thread

seems to defy physical law,

the tensile strength

of the thinnest strand

stronger than steel.

But in a cool dawn

when the wind is still and the spider at rest

the web is bejewelled,

tiny perfect drops of dew

clinging to its mesh

refracting every colour possible.

Beauty, as well as strength.

And the alchemy of size

that allows an insubstantial spider

to slip between the elements.

Never touching earth.

Walking on water

and rising through air.

Playing with the fire

of light.

Some baby spiders are known to sail through the air on strands of silk. In the poem, I have an adult doing the same, which I imagine is at best improbable. But I've seen video of a spider using its legs like this in order to skitter across the still surface of a pond. And the remarkable properties of spider silk are well recognized.

Spider silk demonstrates the cleverness of nature. Incredibly strong, yet light and elastic. And while our industrial processes heat, beat, and treat at great cost in energy and resources, nature somehow manufactures this brilliant substance at room temperature from materials at hand in the tiny organelles of this small animal.

The poem really turns, though, on is this idea of size: how when you live at a different order of magnitude, the world makes a totally different kind of sense. And, by extension, how what we take as inviolable laws – that we fall through water and are heavier than air – are not at all. (Of course, gravity only stops acting at the subatomic level. Even small spiders are not exempt. So I was tempted, in the interest of accuracy, to change that line to gravity seems not to apply. But I find definitive statements work better in poetry. While “seems” strikes me as a weasel word, too namby-pamby to have the impact a line of poetry needs.)

This is another poem of the sort I seem to favour: poems of microcosm, close observation, and taking a moment in time; of lyric poems grounded in nature. And even though they scare many people, I find spiders both compelling and admirable.