The Spider in the Barberry

A Poem

Image by Petra at Pixabay

Here is a fun one. Two things came together for this poem. The obvious one is that I did, indeed, see a spider in her web in one of my barberry bushes. The web was spectacular. The spider was an elegant lady, glossy black against the red leaves. The second thing was Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) which I had recently seen in a gallery. Somehow, the Modernist nude seemed a perfect analogy for the spider.

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The Spider in the Barberry

Nude,

she descends the staircase.

Gliding down the staggered span

in the glory of her dusky skin,

eight stiletto feet traverse

laddered elisions of architecture

not Cubist or Modernist,

but of ancient craft –

the silken scaffold of her appetite

pinned to the thorns and smoking

in the morning light.

*

Her shadow fractures on

red leaves, lethal arcs and angles

of the final dark geometry.

The staircase is an abattoir,

the lady sleek with murder

yet elegant in form and grace

as her swaying, lustrous home –

the cool byzantine trap that

ascends forever outward on the wind.