Poem

The Life Before

It is Saturday. I am cleaning the back porch, rag in hand,
dusting down an old rocking chair, a table, easel. I turn over
a folding cot, springs rusting, frame bent; creak it open
and start wiping the grit from the inside. Then,

a cluster of spiders. I’ve caught them mid-sentence.
They don’t run for cover, just watch me sideways.
The mother is the stillest. Her brown legs spread three inches across.
She was born here, in the half-light, the warm decay.
Now her young are piled around her, white, each large as a thistle head,
but fragile—I’ve already crushed some—legs as fine as the hairs on my arm.
I could easily wipe them all away, wash my rag afterward, still—

“Come see,” I call to my son.
He doesn’t hear me. He’s watching cartoons,
getting over a fever. His cheeks are pink
and his damp hair curls at his temples.
My husband is next to him, dozing,
his feet up on the coffee table. One hand
rests on the book turned over on his chest.
His other arm holds my daughter,
her small fingers opening and closing
on his skin. Her lips open as she sleeps.

So I lift the cot over the side of the deck, lean over and blow.
The mother catches the wind first and wafts down into the grass.
Two more breaths and her children follow in clumps, like dandelion seeds.
I brush the cot down after them.

Inside, my family rests together.
It is not an unusual Saturday.
I shake out my cloth.