Why must it be so cryptic
The content of these pages
Well I’ll tell you dear reader
There are in these parts certain spiders
That build enormous houses
Ten twelve maybe fifteen feet or more
From tip to anchoring tip
Masterpieces of instinctive engineering
Nothing like the sad gun-sight caricature
Of concentric circles with radiating spokes
But irregular in shape
Like snowflakes and everything else no two alike
And every once in a space
The roughly rectangular cells
Are interrupted by a triangle
A strand that intersects an unexpected vertex
Like the flaw deliberately introduced
They say in the weave of a Persian carpet
To acknowledge the subordination
Of human wishes to divine will
And on dewy mornings the intricate device
Shines like an otherworldly chandelier
So pleasing are these witty supplements
All centered upon a splash of zagging scumble
The spider off to one side
A complexity that enhances the overall effect
But the inevitable addition
Of pine needle and broken leaf
Annoys and causes the aesthetically-minded viewer
To wish for a primordially pristine condition
Free from these contaminants
Foolish bitter hurtful desire
No such condition ever was nor should be
For no sooner has Arachne woven her web
But she begins to decorate it
With the skeletons of those
From whom she has sapped the life
The pride of home and hearth
And we who love nature must accommodate
The unlovely cry of the blue jay
The gentle rain so quickly ungentle
The wrath of His Majesty the Sun
The ground ready to renounce its stability
The pat of feces the moldering corpse
The fattening maggots
And the ugly erections of witless humans
Who act according to the dictates of their cortices
Which nature has complicated to insanity
What do we see of stars aloof in their gorgeousness
What do we know of ocean with its pearls chasms and corals
What byzantine events may occur
Within a cubic grain of salt
A red thread runs through all things
Call it consciousness will life
Choose any metaphor you like
For deep within things
Though there is no within or without
We can conclude a reality
Neither dual nor fragmentary
Nor metaphorical
That our gelatinous brains need not consume
Nor our clumsy tongues need fasten a name
And we enter this real world but fleetingly
With the apprehension of the ancient rocks
The sublime regress of cellular physiology
Bacchus leaping from a chariot drawn by cheetahs
While a boy with goat legs drags the head of a deer
For our experience is real if anything is
And more ravenous than spider we would experience all
Though no such comprehension ever was nor should be
And so I print these characters in these pages
In a layer of no depth
A little broken plane
A dot a dash a curving C
The vanity of human wishes
The blue jay cries its wild command
The poet cries the shallowness of hurt