Spiders and Night

It is said that spiders do their best work at night

and in meekness: revealing little of themselves,

save what can be determined in the light,

but it’s a different world by then.

Beginning as if darkness nullifies experience

and purpose remains permanent, they unmake

the past by virtue of the eternal—a web built

without thought of ancestor, its cause

implied in its end; made during dreaming,

surfacing as something of darkness, foreign

in the light—finding its rest in clinging,

peaceful in the face of sunlight.

At night, webs emerge anywhere:

the great dark miracle of time without sun,

there is nowhere to spin except everywhere,

and so it is, without history, no memory,

the process without grounding and doomless,

helpless and brave in facing the promise of sun.

It’s the web that catches things—

easy to become or destroy, impossible

to manipulate; for without memory, its eternal

return stands wrought in all the earth:

each day, its first. Each mind, its own:

catching and resurrecting itself in the dark.

Without Veil

Late sun brick heat cooking in back of me,

and far over the tree line to the West, a steeplecross

melts into the coyote purple, and no geese fly.

Grass leaves rise up, sun-battered into brown,

and ants make circles into sense as the mountain

haze over the steeplecross is only shadow and cloud,

and sparrow-wet wind comes up dry over the land,

loosing its longmuscle through the grass leaves

and tight weeds. My shirt pressed up against me,

and the brick heat downsoftening in coyote time:

all things grow tense; the nightdown breaks the shroud,

all things revealed, like the other side of a coin—

a loose shirt tightwraps the body it covers in the nightwind

but darkness goes out so none can see, like the other side

of a coin, and soon there is no mountain, standing shaped

against coyote time, and the steeplecross is gone,

and no geese are heard dragging sound across darkness.

And drywind softens as the tight weeds slack up,

and all things are still and without fate.

Before the arm of the stars, wheelminds are scattered

in the brush, and cats rustle out of thickets,

but nearby, the trackrattle upstarts, slowbreaking the night

lens, and a soundveil comes down in brush as all things knot

up in discovery, and light starblots the sky out.

Dayshroud comes back up, cracking on as trackrattle

comes up slowgoing, and the dayshroud goes along—

the soundveil snuffs out; the eternal arm of the stars returns

to scatter the wheelminds. And the last cat in the thicket

doesn’t move. She watches a toad shake noise off the coin

in the time without veil, when mystery is renewed, watching

when sounds and lights and trackrattles are gone in the night,

and the veil is taken up by the arm of the stars,

and things are as they are

when they’re watched.