Gwyneth Lewis

from Spiderings



Spider Mother


In that top corner, my torch picks out
the eight red eyes of one cunning spider,

wedged like a camera in its nest of wires.
I am the mote in each eye. Her gazes

trap me, like weighted nets
which have floored me more times

than I care to admit. Once I’m felled,
down she abseils and crawls

tickling, inside my ear, to lay eggs
into my brain. Those cells adjust

to their guest with seasons of migraine
through which I rest, until she emerges,

triumphant, through the arch of my mouth,
clad in chainmail of living armour:

glittering spiderlings, hatched from my mind –
if that can be called my own now, or home.


*


Snare


I won’t call her spider,
                                though I do.
I live in the cage of her legs.
                                I’ve speared
my heart on a pointed stick to attract
                                carnivorous angels
which make a great racket of wings
                                but can’t save.
‘It’s easy to leave, what stops you?’,
                                others ask, baffled.
It’s the snare in the brain, spring-loaded
                                for suicide. The knots
throb, electric, the anguish swells
                                till the trigeminal
nerve slithers out – a hot, pulsing snake –
                                through my eyeball,
leaving a spider’s web tattooed
                                on my face
like a shattered windscreen.
                                This pattern alarms
employers but, honest, though I tell
                                of such horrors,
underneath, I’m a bit of a sweetie.


*


Maze


First, locate your original wound.
I come to in the bathroom, a body beside
me. Did we? Could I have? Check between legs
for dampness. Next, torso. Is this
my own blood? If not, then whose?

Tied to my hand is a thread of scarlet,
an electric cable zinging. Lose it, I die. So I follow
its pull through this house and its generations,
a crazed enfilade of dead ends, cluttered box rooms
while outside– huge thud, a gull

flies into a window. The bird is shattered
in three: the flesh slides down but its shadow
veers off at an angle, climbs, clicking sun’s shutter
right in my face, the third is a burglar alarm
wailing, ‘Emergency!’. Which one should I follow?


*


Missing


So, did I give my luck away? For piano
exams and degrees I wore a chain
with a silver spider plucking death
like a tune on her web, but in my favour.
I passed – how fortunate! My mam
‘kept it safe’, but now I can’t find it.

No sign in the shoebox filled with Whitby jet
in tissue paper, moss agate brooches and –
swift recoil – underneath, a foetus mother
made from my nerves, nourished by ichor,
sour as wasp soup. She mewls for attention.
Too late. On me, her charm’s broken.

I’ll knit my own token instead: fling a cable
woven from habits of mind, the skill
of not-being-me flung over the chasm.
Once fast, I’ll test the tension,
step out, eyes fixed on the other side,
to dance its wide road, with my parasol.


*


Not My Doll, But Just Like Her


I never loved mine, Siwan Elin: I opened
her clock face, its movement clogged dead,
seized up with dried spiders. She told
the wrong time because we were trapped
in rooms snowed under by dead-skin blizzards.

Round here skips mark the implacable massacre
of parents, each one a Pompeii. A hand sticks out
in appeal from a luggage landslide, I rescue a blonde
dolly: hand-knitted pinafore in sage, matching
knickers and vest. Who says you can’t choose

your own household gods? In the past
my lares protector had been repaired
with elastic, holding head, torso, limbs
together. That perished, she fell apart,
so I’m forced to dispose of more body parts.

I. Falling

Spiderings
    15     Spider Mother
    16     Snare
    17     Maze
    18     Missing
    19     Not My Doll But Just Like Her
    20     Any Eight Legs Will Do
    21     Spidering
    22     Away!
    *
    25     Principalities, Dominions
    26     Stage Manager’s Notes
    27     Helpless


II. Unwell

    31     Auras
    34     Another Day Ill in Bed
    35     Red Waistcoat
    36     Will I?
    37     Too Far
    38     Persephone in CERN
    39     Damage
    40     Lips
    41     Earrings from the Anti-Matter Factory
    42     Under
    43     Rogue Female
    44     Fooled Me for Years with the Wrong Pronoun
    45     Fallen Objects that Can’t Be Saved
    46     Relic
    47     Chronic Fatigue
    48     Desolation
    49     Ice Mummy
    50     The Long Crawl up Humanity’s Beach
    51     Ear, Nose and Throat
    52     Grottarossa Mummy


III.  Recovery

    55     Awake
    56     Flowers of the Wayside and Meadow
    57     A Litter Herbal
    58     Late Blackberries
    59     On Stopping the Anti-Depressants
    60     Three Ways into Water
    61     The Beat
    62     Riverlarking
First Rain in Paradise
    65     Previous
    66     Shame
    67     Kidnapped
    68     Floods
    69     Expulsion
    *
    71     Ornithology
    72     An Explanation of Doily

    77     Notes & acknowledgements