Love Song for Arachne

About observation and long friendships and weaving

I’ve started taking a class with my old painter friend, Johnny. The class is Poetry as a Spiritual Practice with Chris LaTrey, who writes a revelatory newsletter, The Irritable Métis.

For the first week, our exercise was to spend some time sitting in a quiet place, observing. Try to observe something new, even if the place is familiar to you. Try to see something different.

In DC, I tried paying attention to the potted petunias on my rooftop. The crows wouldn’t let me not pay attention to them, cawing and swooping down the alleys; bickering, occasionally, for position.

I couldn’t look away from power though. That’s just how DC is built.

I noticed that the dome of the Library of Congress is set just enough down from the dome of the Capitol that, should the statue of Freedom that graces the tip of the Capitol ever descend, she would have to gather up her robes, bend her knees, and probably leap over onto the dome of the Library on her way down. I worried that she might get a little embarrassed — it would be a hard scramble to execute gracefully.

(And then, of course, she would land on the Torch of Learning that tops the Library — presumably not the most comfortable place for her enormous toes. Maybe descending Freedom crushes the Torch of Learning? Maybe that’s why she stays up there, all this time.)

But this is silliness.

Now that I’m with my mom in Blacksburg, Virginia on the occasion of her birthday, I can sit on her beautiful back deck and devote myself to more of what this exercise is probably supposed to be about. Silence. Nature. Observation.

Yesterday was a misty, rainy morning. There was a spider who had made her web across my usual seat, so I took another one. She was chestnut brown like a peach pit and fuzzy like a peach’s skin, with white stripes on her legs. (I think possibly she was a furrow orb-weaver spider? Please let me know in the comments if you have a better ID.)

The white on her legs reminded me of paint, the way Johnny used to have paint on every pair of pants he owned.

I had probably seen Johnny many times — at orientation for our public boarding school, in the cafeteria, and so on — but the first time I ever *saw* him was as I emerged from a piano practice room in Natchitoches, Louisiana. I was supposed to practice classical music but I preferred ragtime, so let’s imagine I had a few jaunty strains still running through my head when I looked over the brick-red hills, into the sunset, and barely made out a couple, walking from the boy’s dorm to the girl’s dorm.

He was tall, with floppy blonde hair, and she was short, with curly dark hair, and his clothes — his jeans especially — were covered in paint. By the way he gestured, I felt he was explaining some new discovery, some new enthusiasm, and she was — more cautiously — getting into it too, and I thought — that guy. I am going to make him my friend, and we will talk about Art.

Next semester, we had trigonometry together at a disastrously early hour of the morning. I sat behind him, would prod him if he fell asleep, and after class we’d sign a ledger and thereby gain permission to walk off campus to a Texaco gas station for coffee and egg rolls, the latter of which they made right there and kept on metal rollers like hot dogs. (In retrospect, I may have been the only one who ate the egg rolls. Johnny might have been wise enough to stick to the coffee.)

We talked about painting. I gathered him in, and we wove stories about the art we wanted to make, the art we read about.

And now, so many years later! We’re in a poetry class, and I am sitting next to a spider with paint on her legs.

Strange, how the world works sometimes.

I take out my camera and there is just enough room on this deck to get her in focus. Sometimes, as we’ve discussed, taking photos can take you out of the moment, get you to lose focus.

But not this time. Standing ten paces from the spider, timing my breath with my clicks so that I am as still as I can be, I can feel every bristle, every extra eyeball and awkwardly angled joint, every ripple as a raindrop hits her web.