Entranced and Spider

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Andrea Gibson

Entranced   by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It scared me and thrilled me, the quick spider,
   a gentle light gray, like midnight midsummer
   in Finland. It was unusually large 
for this part of the world where spiders
   tend to be smaller than a dime. But this
   spider had long, elegant legs, 
I carefully gathered it in tissue.
   You belong out here, I said, as I walked it to the lawn.
   Slow as you please, it let out a length of dragline silk 
to dangle from my hand like a pendulum.
   Two nights ago, I held in my arms a newborn girl,
   eyelashes barely visible, little bubbles forming
between slightly parted lips, her eyes moving
   in sleep. What could be in the dreams of a three-
   day-old child? I cradled her head in one hand, 
her whole body in the other, astonished by how
   much preciousness fits in a being so small. 
   All around us, so many kinds of beautiful lives.
And inside us, so many invisible strands of astonishing 
   elasticity and tensile strength that weave us together
   through the chaos, beauty to beauty to bittersweet beauty
   to innocent beauty to unlikely beauty to beauty.



Spider  by Andrea Gibson

All of my pain is a spider 
I’ve learned not to crush 
with the heel of my shoe 

but to guide with a page 
of my journal 
into an empty glass. 

I ask questions about 
its life, its purpose 
as I walk careful 

out to the garden and rest 
it down on the earth. 
My pain—how happy 
it is to leave me 
whenever I treat it 
kind.