Introduction

I imagine an audience of less than a dozen for this, perhaps overly peculiar, combination of photographs and the short poems they’ve inspired. My low expectations are founded on the assumptions that fewer people read every day, that of those who read only a fraction read poetry, and that most of these are uncomfortable with spiders. Those are filters that winnow things down quite a bit! But I welcome the six of you who appreciate the dramatic gravity of spiders, and how rich they are in associations; sometimes menacing, sometimes awesome, and occasionally piratically-louche. Like snakes, blood and oil leaks, spiders rivet attention and appear much larger in the eye than on a measuring tape. Poetry is what you think it is. Not so spiders. Knowing a little about some of the pictured species’ behaviors and habitats enriches the context of the accompanying poem. That and some possible obscurities are addressed below. When I was able, I identified specific spiders in the table of contents and those interested in their natural history can proceed from there.

 

Darkside of the darkest moon: A version of the Irish saying: “If you touch the devil, you can’t let go.”

Follow, follow the brightening light: In some schools of Buddhism, the Bardo is a transitional or liminal state between death and rebirth.

Mother, oh mother, your feet are so cold: The connected silk spheres are sacs filled with eggs.

Tiny, tiny, small and tiny,: Mammon is wealth greedily pursued. In the Middle Ages it was personified as the Devil of Avarice.

Rise, rise reconciled spirit: The dried remains of a dead spider or the shed skin left after a molt (see below).

Born again, and again: A spider’s shed skin. Many spiders shed their exoskeletons, and expand to grow, five to seven times before reaching adulthood.

Soul, soul, here is a picture of my soul.: The psyche in modern usage is the totality of the mind, conscious and unconscious, i.e., soul. In Greek mythology the soul was personified as Psyche, a beautiful woman with butterfly wings (although the lovely wings here belong to a palm flatid).

Venus, Venus gargantuan, Venus gigantica, Venus majestas obscura,: Female spiders, particularly in the golden-orb-spiders and other large web-building species, can be as much as 10X larger than males. Sexual cannibalism in extremely dimorphic species is prevalent.

Don’t look, don’t look at me.: An extraordinarily camouflaged spider that curls up and lays to one side after moving. See the same individual up and about in the poem “Dry, dry, so awful dry and alone.” Since the animal is less than the size of a grain of rice it would be interesting to know what visually acute predator(s) has driven the evolution of this micro-detailed crypsis (jumping spiders?)

Drop, drop of Mercury,: The silver spider is a food-thief, and is feeding on a beetle leg it has separated from its larger host’s meal. The Roman god Mercury (Hermes in Greek mythology) had many roles to fill. Among them, guide of the dead to the underworld, god of boundaries (sometimes marked with carvings of his grimacing face) and, paradoxically (?), patron of thieves.

I too take what I want from the mighty: The spear-tip shaped invader is eating a female orb-web spider that was guarding her eggs.

Sleep, sleep: A jumping spider is inactive in its silken refuge.

Round, round, all around round: A mother Red Widow, an endangered species, dispatches one of two ants, or perhaps parasitoid wasps, on her silken egg sac.

Giant, giant,: The little flies (prob. Chloropidae) on top of the spider’s meal are another type of food-thief that drinks the fluids spilling from the spider’s mouth or predigested tissue on the prey.

God-the-Potter: Some spiders hide behind or within detritus in their web.

Simple, simple,: I have tried to keep the photographs “realistic”, i.e., no changes to hue, vibrancy or saturation, no added colors. They are what you might see in nature under a particular light. This picture is an exception and is the result of a partial flash-failure.

Sad, sad and dreary world,: The Giant Lichen Orb Weaver is, well, gigantic for a web-spinning spider hanging upon a thread. The sort of spider that leads you to say: “My God that’s a big spider!”. It is one of many nocturnal species that takes down their webs each morning and is so well camouflaged during its daytime rest that it’s seldom noticed. I was lucky to catch it eating a beetle it had been unable to fully consume that night

The end is always near,: The little artist is in the center of the photograph. Cursed, cursed,: Among her other roles, Athena was the Greek goddess of pottery and crafts.

Looking, looking at a very large thing: The very small thing before the spider’s eyes, moved and could have been a mite displaced from the prey.

1: Edge, the very edge: See mention of the sage Yang Chu’s, (the first and possibly most extreme Libertarian), distressed weeping when confronted with choosing a path. in E. Weinberger, 2024, The Life of Tu Fu, New Directions, N.Y., N.Y.

Really small head,: Some crane flies (Tipulidae) shelter during the day by hanging in spider webs.

Misshapen, ridiculous,: The tiny “pirate spider” is actually quite fierce, preying on other spiders in their webs. Climbing, climbing,: The rarely seen Ogrefaced spider takes its name from two enormous eyes, here barely visible on along head’s “horizon”. When hunting, it holds a small web in its front four legs to scoop up prey, a bit like a fisherman using a landing net.

Communion, sacred, sacred,: I am not sure what is actually happening between the spider and “the object” which conceivably could be an unusual prey item (as the poem suggests), trash or the pupa/ cyst of a parasitoid/ parasite that manipulated the dying host into standing guard. Or something else..