Compass

Two Spiders

Raised, one white banded leg in staying / paying-out,
dangling from her thread, the little spider starved
who yesterday descended during clattering
of plates and noise of boiler, realized mistake,
scuttled back up dangle-line, leg over leg over leg.

Hangs over sea-lavender, one dead-form above another,
a demonstrative present, my new kitchen decoration,
swaying, twisting to a puff of breath, white dots
done with stratagem of camouflage.
_____________________________It's wet again,
though warm the breathy breeze, so humid here
would hardly dry a line, and flies bombing out
from sheltering leaves, carrier-deck catapult-launched
surveying opportunity, incipience of sun
which soon, sigh, hey, is wrapped away in sliding ceiling,
interminably grey, and so the play's delayed and
wings return to green-rooms in the hedge.
______________________________Between bird feeder
and straw-heads she's run her long stays
to bend tall grasses to her tethering will;
and in the very middle of this sketched-out scheme
the outer strands of a vast web from her spinnerets
(liquid silk from her spigots muscled out
in fine coordination, spun kevlar tough)
is dexterously leg-placed by the banded tip
a measured radial distance folded, by a knee.

We know perfection's implicate, in genome,
layers of that library game - the RNAs,
distributed architecture of her nerves - and yet
we do not know the detail of the route at all.

We sit on complexity's edge and tinker.
At algorithms we are not so very clever
as to carry off such robust, grand design.

Forget the science; its the life we know, we've strayed
and caught it in our hair from young, and horrid-pawed
in panic, crushing off the things about our ears.

And at that moment, dark in primal memories
standing before her, centered in her maze, the sun
tears grey cloud envelope shouting, blinding, down
choruses of tanning warmth, despite it's Autumn -
and maybe flies will come to play a while.

......................
Wattpad won't do indents now if you put spaces in. It just deletes the spaces, so I have had to use lines "____" to get the indents. Another needless struggle against the Philistine.