Webs

She spun words and stories

like the spider which inhabited

her windowsill.  Her wordy

webs glistened in the sunlight

and caught her audience like flies,

but she never had the heart

to eat them.

Instead she lived on water,

collected from the dripping dew

of her spider’s web.  Her mother

said she was mad, but she understood

an artist’s soul because her mother

had once been a painter.

Most Saturdays she coaxed the spider

onto her finger and read aloud

her latest sonnet, pronouncing each word

carefully.  The spider nodded

in appreciation, because the spider

understood what it meant to be an artist

of the most delicate crafts.

Sometimes she daydreamed, gazing lazily

into the spider’s web while twisting

plots in her mind and tasting synonyms

on her tongue and then placing them with love

on paper, all the while watching the spider

dance at the bottom of her thread.