I will not disturb you, guest behind veil,
Half phased as if a dream's begun to pale.
My breath might afear you, make your etching withdraw,
Eight eyes through gauzed ice, do you see me in thaw?
Your legs like quills in inkless strokes extend,
Each tremor a thought I can't comprehend.
A watercoloured blur that soaks through air,
Suspended as if our beyond isn't there.
Your life is starker, yet wholly you remain,
Complete in moments I too often disdain.
Where I stretch years in doubt's decay,
You simply are - then fade away.
Bugbitesquared's profile: https://www.pi.fyi/u/bugbitesquared
-- During colder Winter nights, I’ve often found White Tail Spiders half hidden in the bathroom, near the sink or shelves. Poised between flight and stillness. I freeze at first too, unsure if I’ve been spotted myself, who’d move first. They’re not large, not like the Huntsman, but they’re still big enough to take up an unignorable amount of peripheral vision.
For them, I usually fetch tupperware and a scrap of torn cardboard, coax them gently inside, and travel outside to the garden with them in tow. I notice how there’s no breath, as us mammals know it, to fog up my makeshift transport for them. The only breath is mine, outside plastic. There’s something strange about the weight of sparing a weightless spider. To squish them, to then perhaps chuck them in the bin, or flush them down the toilet? Unbearable to bear the abruptness of ending a being that is so wholly itself.
They mean no harm. The ones that can harm, only out of survival, fear reflected, I’ve never seen make home in my home. The Redbacks and Brown Recluses here, at least, stay woven in wooden fences and sheds.
When a Huntsman does appear, perhaps because they’re so much bigger, enough so that I can see the glint of their eyes, they elicit a different feeling. I’ll leave them be, completely. They’re typically up beyond the house walls and ceiling where I cannot reach, yes, but they don’t overstay. At least, not where I can still have view of them. Despite their size, they may be better hiders!
Then, there’s the Daddy Long Legs. They keep to corners. High and low. Delicate, papery. Long legs as their namesake - thin, they catch the light. I find comfort in their unobtrusive presence. Sometimes I find their husks, the empty exoskeletons left behind. To hold the fragile casing between my fingers, I don’t know, there’s a beauty to it. Something so relatively temporary leaving such a perfect impression of itself behind in growth, or, stuck in their last exoskeleton not shed, death.
I wonder what I look like in Spiders’ eight eyes. What they see when I shift in the light, when I breathe or talk too loudly or pause too long. How enormous am I? Are they actually looking back at me, even briefly, or always waiting for smaller things, feeling for smaller things, to find their web in finality.
Occasionally I do intentionally blow on the web spiders rest on, to see if they’ll stir, to check if they’re still alive. A molt. Or a preserved body.
When a fly finds its way through an open door that is now closed (though I do open it again, trying to let the fly out, but then more flies get caught inside and cannot find their way out in tandem) - frantic buzzing, stumbling against the glass it cannot see as the transparent wall to the outside, until, the sound stops. Caught in the patient architecture of a web.
Out on the hot brick pavement of Summer, I’ve found other endings. Spiders unmoving, legs curled inwards, surrounded by ants. A tiny body being dismantled by even tinier bodies. A slow, functional, never cruel, necessary, disassembly. What has lived and consumed becomes part of the Earth again. What has spun and crept and hidden, returns to be consumed, to feed the soil and the others waiting beneath it.
I envy that, sometimes. I spend so much time overthinking, hesitating, trying to understand what I feel, to understand how I feel about what I feel. The spider never questions its place, it moves through the world as if it belongs there, because it does - maybe that's all belonging ever really is. Reckon I'm still learning to do that.
I'll carry the next one outside, at night, and watch it dart into the dark.
