Hairy Spider

by Henri Cole [Guest Contributor]

There’s nothing like a big long-legged spider to embody 
the mind’s life-giving power, especially when her babies 
run up and stroke her face (if she has a face). Soon it will storm 
and all of them will drown. Still, I love to watch their web changing, 
like this year’s words for this year’s language, not didactic, 
but affective, while absorbing the secret vibrations from the world, 
and I love it when she climbs across clear water and drags 
some horsefly back, like Beelzebub, to her silk coffer. 
There’s something unsettling happening, I know, but it tests 
the connections between everything. Can she see if I am climbing, 
I wonder, or kneeling down here on the dock, day after day, 
when it’s time for reading and writing again, and a hairy spider – 
ingenious, bashful, insolent, laborious, patient – observes 
a man no different than a lily, a worm, a clod of clay?

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956 and raised in Virginia. His volumes of poetry include: Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), the 2008 recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Middle Earth (2003), which received the 2004 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Visible Man (1998); The Look of Things (1995); The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (1989); and The Marble Queen (1986). Cole’s awards and honors include the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also published collections in Spanish, French, and Italian. A new book, Touch, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.