Teach me the spider’s
ontological geometry.
Let me be born
to spin myself,
this edge
to another edge
with fingery gestures
as elegant as the harpist’s;
teach me
to wrap the dead
and to twitch,
each morning,
beside the work-wrecked lace.
Let blood be
what the beauty’s for.
What of it?
A spider is a spider,
and a spider weaves.
Catherine Turnbull‘s work has appeared in The Green Mountains Review, The Michigan Poet, Dos Passos Review, and others. Her chapbook, The Chocolatier Speaks of His Wife, was published by MI Writers Cooperative Press in 2008. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan.