by Mary Oliver
its tail flailing
like a bundle of swords,
slashing the grass,
and the inside of its cradle-shaped mouth
gaping,
and rimmed with teeth—
and that’s how I almost died
of foolishness
in beautiful Florida.
But I didn’t.
I leaped aside, and fell,
and it streamed past me, crushing everything in its path
as it swept down to the water
and threw itself in,
and, in the end,
this isn’t a poem about foolishness
but about how I rose from the ground
and saw the world as if for the second time,
the way it really is.
The water, that circle of shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back
with the back-lit light of polished steel,
and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees,
shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away,
while, for a keepsake, and to steady myself,
I reached out,
I picked the wild flowers from the grass around me—
blue stars
and blood-red trumpets
on long green stems—
for hours in my trembling hands they glittered
like fire.
The Hermit Crab
Once I looked inside
the darkness
of a shell folded like a pastry,
and there was a fancy face—
or almost a face—
it turned away
and frisked up its brawny forearms
so quickly
against the light
and my looking in
I scarcely had time to see it,
gleaming
under the pure white roof
of old calcium.
When I set it down, it hurried
along the tideline
of the sea,
which was slashing along as usual,
shouting and hissing
toward the future,
turning its back
with every tide on the past,
leaving the shore littered
every morning
with more ornaments of death—
what a pearly rubble
from which to choose a house
like a white flower—
and what a rebellion
to leap into it
and hold on,
connecting everything,
the past to the future—
which is of course the miracle—
which is the only argument there is
against the sea.
Hannah’s Children
They will come in their own time,
Probably in the black
Funnel of the night,
And probably in secret—
No one will see
Their marvelous coming
But the other goats,
And Maple the pony.
Now, on the evening
Of the last counted day,
We latch the stable door.
As the white moon rises
She settles to her knees.
Her curious yellow eyes—
Old as the stones
Of Greece, of the mountains
That were born with the world—
Look at us in friendship,
And then look away,
Inward. Inward
To the sacred groves.
Pipefish
In the green
and purple weeds
called Zostera, loosely
swinging in the shallows,
I waded, I reached
my hands
in that most human
of gestures—to find,
to see,
to hold whatever it is
that’s there—
and what came up
wasn’t much
but it glittered
and struggled,
it had eyes, and a body
like a wand,
it had pouting lips.
No longer,
all of it,
than any of my fingers,
it wanted
away from my strangeness,
it wanted
to go back
into that waving forest
so quick and wet.
I forget
when this happened,
how many years ago
I opened my hands—
like a promise
I would keep my whole life,
and have—
and let it go.
I tell you this
in case you have yet to wade
into the green
and purple shallows
where the diminutive
pipefish
wants to go on living.
I tell you this
against everything you are—
your human heart,
your hands passing over the world,
gathering and closing,
so dry and slow.
This Too
There was the body of the fawn, in the leaves,
under the tall oaks.
There was the face, the succulent mouth,
the pink, extruded tongue.
There were the eyes.
There was its dark dress, half pulled off.
There were its little hooves.
There was the smell of change, which was
stink.
There was my dog’s nose, reading the silence
like a book.
No one spoke, not the Creator, not the Preserver,
not the Destroyer.
There was the sound of wind in the leaves,
in the tall oaks.
There was the terrible excitement
of the flies.
Swoon
In a corner of the stairwell of this rented house a most astonishing adventure is going on. It is only the household of a common spider,* a small, rather chaotic web half in shadow. Yet it burgeons with the ambition of a throne. She—for it is the female that is always in sight—has produced six egg sacs, and from three of them, so far, an uncountable number of progeny have spilled. Spilled is precisely the word, for the size and the motions of these newborns are so meager that they appear at first utterly lifeless, as though the hour of beginning had come and would not be deferred, and thrust them out, with or without their will, to cling in a dark skein in the tangled threads.
I am less precise about the timing of these events than I would like. While I was quick to notice the spider and her web, I was slow to write down the happenings as they occurred, a concordance I now wish I had. It was so casual at first, I was sure that something—probably a careless motion on my part—would demolish or tear the web and remove the spider from sight. But it did not happen.
I began to watch her in October, and it’s fair to say that, being a poor sleeper especially when away from home, I have watched her quite as much during the night as during the day.
Now it is early December.
I am extremely careful as I descend or ascend the stairs.
Perhaps when I pass by she senses my heft and shadow. But she floats on her strings and does not move. Nor, I think, would she flee easily from any intrusion. Her egg sacs, all of them, are hanging near her, in an archipelago, the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom, and without question she is attached to them in some bond of cherishing. Often she lies with her face against the most recently constructed, touching it with her foremost set of limbs. And why should she not be fond of it? She made it from the materials of her own body—deft and plump she circled and circled what was originally a small package, and caused it to grow larger as the thread flowed from her body. She wrapped and wrapped until, now, the sac sways
with the others in the threads of the web, not round exactly, but like a Lilliputian gas balloon, pulled slightly along the vertical.
And still she fusses, pats it and circles it, as though coming to a judgment; then pats some more, or dozes, still touching it. Finally, she withdraws her sets of legs, curls them, almost as if in a swoon, or a death, and hangs, motionless, for a full half day. She seems to sleep.
The male spider comes and goes. Every third or fourth day I catch sight of him lurking at the edge of the web. What he eats I cannot guess, for the treasures of the web—which do not come, sometimes, for many days—are to all evidence for the female only. Whether she refuses to offer him a place at her table, or whether he has no need of it, I do not know. He is a dapper spider; being male and no spinner, he lacks the necessity of the pouch-like body in which to store the materials from which comes the bold and seemingly endless thread. He is therefore free to be of another nature altogether—small, and shy, and quick.
Twice while I have been watching, when the egg sacs have been in the unseeable process of pouring the tiny, billeted spiders forth, he has been in the web. Perhaps, like some male cats, and other mammals also, he will take this arrival with ill humor and feast on a few of his own progeny.
I do not know.
Whenever I see him poised there and lean closer to him, he steps briskly backward, is instantly enfolded into darkness and gone from sight.
It is five A.M.
Good fortune has struck the web like an avalanche. A cricket—not the black, flat-bodied, northern sort I am used to, but a paler variety, with a humped, shrimp-like body and whip-like antennae and jumper’s legs—has become enmeshed in the web.
This spider is not an orb weaver; that is, she does not build a net silken and organized and centered along a few strong cables. No, her web is a poor thing. It is flung forth, ungloriously, only a few inches above the cellar floor. What is visible is in a wild disorder. Nevertheless, it functions; it holds, now, the six egg cases and the cricket, which struggles in a sort of sling of webbing.
The spider now is never still. She descends to the cricket again and again, then hastens away and hangs a short distance above. Though it is almost impossible to see, a fine line follows her, jetting from her spinneret; as she moves, she is wrapping the cricket. Soon the threads thicken; the cricket is bound with visible threads at the ankles, which keep it from tearing loose with the strength of the huge back legs. How does the spider know what it knows? Little by little the cricket’s long front limbs with their serrated edges, flung in an outward gesture from its body, are also being wrapped. Soon the cricket’s efforts to free itself are only occasional—a few yawings toward push or pull—then it is motionless.
All this has taken an hour.
There has been nothing consumable in the web for more than a week, during which time the spider has made her sixth egg case and, presumably, before that, carried through some motions of romance with her consort, and produced the actual eggs. Her body during this week—I mean that dust-colored, sofa-button, bulbous part of her body so visible to our eyes—has shrunk to half its previous size.
Then, as I continued to watch, the spider began a curious and coordinated effort. She dropped to the cricket and with her foremost limbs, which are her longest, she touched its body. The response was an immediate lurching of cricket, also spider and web. Swiftly she turned—she was, in fact, beginning the motions of turning even as she reached forward and then, even before the cricket reacted, with her hindmost pair of limbs she kicked it. She did this over and over—descending, touching and turning, kicking—each of her kicks targeting the cricket’s stretched-out back limbs. She did this perhaps twenty times. With every blow the cricket swung, then rocked back to motionlessness, the only signs of life a small, continual motion of the jointed mouth, and a faint bubbling therefrom.
As I watched, the spider wrapped its thread again around the cricket’s ankles. Then, with terrible and exact precision, she moved toward an indentation of flesh just at the elbow joint of the cricket’s left front limb—and to this soft place she dipped her mouth. But, yet again, at this touch, the cricket lurched. So she retreated, and waited, and then again, with an undivertable aim, descended to that elbow where, finally, with no reaction from the cricket, she was able for perhaps three minutes to place her small face. There, as I imagine it, she began to infuse her flesh-dissolving venom into the channels of the cricket’s body. Intermittently the cricket still moved, so this procedure even yet required some stopping and restarting, but it was clearly an unretractable operation. At length, in twenty minutes perhaps, the cricket lay utterly quiescent; and then the spider moved, with the most gentle and certain of motions, to the cricket’s head, its bronze, visor-like face, and there, again surely and with no hesitation, the spider positioned her body, her mouth once more at some chosen juncture, near throat, the spinal cord, the brain.
Now she might have been asleep as she lay, lover-like, alongside the cricket’s body. Later—hours later—she moved down along its bronze chest, and there fed again. Slowly her shrunken body grew larger, then very large. And then it was night.
Early in the morning, the cricket was gone. As I learned from later examples, when the quiescent cricket was no more than a shell, she had cut it loose. It had dropped to the cellar floor, where any number of living crickets occasionally went leaping by. By any one of them it had been dragged away. Now the spider, engorged, was motionless. She slept with her limbs enfolded slightly—the same half clench of limbs one sees in the bodies of dead spiders—but this was the twilight rest, not the final one. This was the restoration, the interval, the sleep of the exhausted and the triumphant.
I have not yet described the mystery and enterprise for which she lives—the egg sacs and the young spiders. They emerge from their felt balloon and hang on threads near it: a fling, a nebula. Only by putting one’s face very close, and waiting, and not breathing, can one actually see that the crowd is moving. It is motion not at all concerted or even definite but it is motion, and that, compared with no movement at all, is of course everything. And it grows. Perhaps the spiders feel upon the tender hairs of their bodies the cool, damp cellar air, and it is a lure. They want more. They want to find out things. The tiny limbs stretch and shuffle.
Little by little, one or two, then a dozen, begin to drift into a wider constellation—toward the floor or the stair wall—spreading outward even as the universe is said to be spreading toward the next adventure and the next, endlessly.
In six or seven days after their birth, the little spiders are gone. And my attention passes from that opened and shrunken pod to the next below it, which is still secretly ripening, in which the many minuscule bodies are still packed tightly together, like a single thing.
How do they get out of the egg sac? Do they tear it with their fragile limbs? Do they chew it with their unimaginably tiny mouths?
I do not know.
Nor do I know where they all go, though I can imagine the dispersal of thousands into the jaws of the pale, leaping crickets. Certainly only a few of them survive, or we would be awash upon their rippling exertions.
Only once in this space of time, after the bursting of three of the six pods, did I see what was clearly a young spider; many times its original birth size and still no larger than a pencil’s point, it was crawling steadily away through a last hem of the mother web.
This is the moment in an essay when the news culminates and, subtly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is a music to be played with the lightest fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
But a spider? Even that?
Even that.
Our time in this rented house was coming to an end. For days I co
nsidered what to do with the heroine of this story and her enterprise, or if I should do anything at all. The owners of the house were to return soon; no reason to think they would not immediately sweep her away. And, in fact, we had ordered a housecleaning directly following our departure. Should I attempt to remove her, therefore? And if so, to what place? To the dropping temperatures of the yard, where surely she could not last out the coming winter? To another basement corner? But would the crickets be there? Would the shy male spider find her? Could I move the egg sacs without harming them, and the web intact, to hold them?
Finally, I did nothing. I simply was not able to risk wrecking her world, and I could see no possible way I could move the whole kingdom. So I left her with the only thing I could—the certainty of a little more time. For our explicit and stern instructions to the cleaners were to scrub the house—but to stay out of this stairwell altogether.
* Probably Therium tepidariorum
How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea
Somewhere down beach, in the morning, at water’s edge, I found
a sea turtle,
its huge head a smoldering apricot, its shell streaming with sea-
weed,
its eyes closed, its flippers motionless.
When I bent down, it moved a little.
When I picked it up, it sighed.
Was it forty pounds, or fifty pounds, or a hundred?
Was it two miles back to the car?
We walked a little while, and then we rested, and then we walked on
I walked with my mouth open, my heart roared.
The eyes opened, I don’t know what they thought.
Sometimes the flippers swam at the air.
Sometimes the eyes closed.
I couldn’t walk anymore, and then I walked some more
while it turned into granite, or cement, but with that apricot-
colored head,
that stillness, that Buddha-like patience, that cold-shocked
but slowly beating heart.
Finally, we reached the car.