The Spider
The spider I should've left alone
intruded upon my web of solitude one
evening while the TV and its gray-blue
squawking did more to irritate me
than any arachnid should've been able.
But it was so much smaller than me,
and seemed so helpless, gliding across
the linoleum like a miniature, downy
boat, rushing to what I could not say,
although if pressed, because I think
I know the natural world, I might've
guessed that it was afraid. However,
fear is a human construction, a name
Adam gave to the nausea he felt after
he ate the first bit of forbidden fruit,
and God's big voice began to complain.
If he had called that sudden pang lust,
we would've experienced another world
entirely. The spider knew none of this.
In the great telescoping hall of being,
it crouches away in a well-greased
corner, somewhere ahead of the flea
and behind the cricket. And yet we,
forever looking toward the sun or back
to our dim origins, assume the space
we sense and calculate remains consistent
on one rung as another. But what if the spider
felt not fear but something different
when it sensed in its dark and tingling
senses that this change of light,
the night of a footstep, the shadow
shrinking from unsolicited twilight
to precise darkness, was its ship sinking?
What if it were annoyed, disappointed
that life was over, and it had never
a chance to bite that pussycat on its pink
heart-shaped nose, or perform a last
act of meanness on one thing or another?
Tonsure
At the tonsorial parlor, I will be exalted,
pumped up on an antique pneumatic barber's chair,
wreathed with garlands of hair
and shagged with a plastic cape
which keeps off the clippings. First, I wait
with the rest of the shaggy heads on the bench,
eyes averted like sinning parishioners on a pew
waiting for the confessional booth. We sit
monk-like, humble, penitent, hands folded over our bellies
until we're called. The scissors whisper
like angels in our ears. And here
a physical change connotes a change of spirit,
as if by revealing the forehead, the neck, the ears
we get to see God's face in the oblong mirror,
in our own rumpled brows. This is why we cut our hair.
It's revelation. You leave a new person, lighter now,
keener of sight, somehow saved. So I pay
and tip heartily and hit the pavement once again.
The barber's pole spins goodbye behind me.
The wind rakes at my eyes. I see so clearly
I almost cry, my smile burning, my forehead gleaming.
Remains
My mother will be buried
in a tomb inside a wall,
embalmed with the fear
that dogged her so in life.
My father will be burned,
his bones singed to ash.
And placed beside his urn
for all eternity, as long
as this eternity may last,
the charred remains of all
the dogs he fed and walked
and watered and cared for.
It seems perfect that
my mother and my father
should rest in death like this
because death, in this
advanced age, should be
the image of life
as we wish it to be —
my mother whole and safe,
my father never alone.
©Adam Penna.
Adam Penna lives and writes on Shelter Island, NY. His work has appeared in Abbey, Bellowing Ark, Cimarron Review, and Xanadu among other magazines. He holds an MFA from Southampton College, adjuncts for sport, and bends copper for a living. Penna's work can be seen at Rio: A Journal of the Arts, and seen and heard at Concrete Wolf.
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