Spider In the Tub
Spider In the Tub No knowing how long she’d been in there. Like a mountaineer who has fallen Into a crevasse. Instead of blue ice — Sheer porcelain impossibility. There were no dead flies for her to live on. She must have been starving. I could have killed her. I couldn’t have. I placed a glass over her and instantly Shrunk her already shrunken world. I was surprised she jumped against the glass With the power of popcorn popping. I’d never pictured a spider jumping. It was possible now to get closer. She was huge. She nearly filled the glass. She’d stopped jumping. She seemed resigned to dying In a glass room with a porcelain floor. I slipped a postcard of Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of Saint Peter (It too has eight legs) under the glass And raised her up in a priestly way And dropped her out the open window Through which she must have come in.