Araneus Diadematus
~European garden spider
Most of the time it is a she,
reinventing herself with each web,
that first strand of silk, a guideline
flung across air,
deft as the flash of a frog’s tongue.
She crosses the web like Christ
on the water,
so it trembles beneath her octet of legs.
Her body light as a fly.
As she moves, she stretches each strand,
then releases it,
the way a bow presses and sways over
its bridge of strings,
or a breeze tweaks a section of sky,
coaxing it back into song.
reinventing herself with each web,
that first strand of silk, a guideline
flung across air,
deft as the flash of a frog’s tongue.
She crosses the web like Christ
on the water,
so it trembles beneath her octet of legs.
Her body light as a fly.
As she moves, she stretches each strand,
then releases it,
the way a bow presses and sways over
its bridge of strings,
or a breeze tweaks a section of sky,
coaxing it back into song.
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano-Mover, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award, In the Body of Our Lives, Sixteen Rivers Press, and Everything Turns Into Something Else, runner-up for the 2019 Grayson Books Prize. Her work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Florida Review, Mississippi Review and The Southern Review.
Art: Creative Commons