Requiems for a Spider - A Series of Covid19 Quarantine Poems

                 Barn door plank.  Keene, NY.  

                             March 26, 2020.

[Saturating in William Carlos Williams, Carl Rakosi, 

zen and zen poets of yore - imagists galore - these 

efforts in remote mountains upstate New York 2020]

'But if it ends 
the start is begun' - William Carlos Williams *1 

the fragility of the web 
infused 
penetrates spaces *2

1

to engage a spider 
where 
once were roses 

becomes a geometry which 
indeed 
a spider is 


its shape, that is, a 
spider 
at web's edge, 

waits 


or is it 


2

Newly dead 
I swore you 
to a would-be 
cloud 

bore you to the lowest boulder 

I, too, soon to be shroud 


you lived silent enough to be 
ignored 
so passing, yours, 

calls attention 
well deserved 


pity or verse? 
both in one? 

the Worst 

3

bidden, it bore 

not a grave 
but a door 

where is no need to knock 


its life grokked 
it is no longer 

there's no mock in 
it tho 
as it was and now is 


all that is not 

never 
was its business 

but its was only to 
obey 
That which bade 

spider 
poet 
maker 

it made 

all praise to the Bidder 

4

Reading William Carlos Williams "Spring and All " 

- these efforts/echoes made

Requiem 

the tactility of the spider 
bemused 
concentrates skies *2

a web 
it 
was 

there strung 

and 
purled 

pearled between limbs 

beneath trunks amid 

fiddle ferns spun 

between brittle sticks 


there mute legs 

somehow click 


tho no ear hears 

but 

trembles 


feels 


which are ways 

of knowing 


but work they 
unwinding 
beneath faint stray leaves 

each strand somehow 
sticks 

echoes catching where 
spider 
tufts sough 


a 
brief 
webbed kingdom 

such sleights 
do filaments trace 

alone with the Alone

***

*1 early lines by W. C. Williams in his book Spring and All

*2 & *3  are riffs on lines by Williams from Spring and All

 

        Decades past, an uncleaned mirror in an 

          abandoned barn.  Vague me a few 

         weeks into covid exile in Keene, NY, 

                         March 26, 2020