The orb-weavers

The orb-weavers
 
The orb-weavers spin their way across my doorframe in the night
in new July. In the garden of the small hours, broad
webs blossom like meadow boneset in patches of spindly white.
 
An armful of silk awaits both she who would go come daylight,
and she who’d creep home in the still-dark hours (though no one saw
the orb-weavers spin their way across my doorframe in the night).
 
Target first the structure, not the architect; with lit flashlight
sparking from silk like nervous lightning, use wielded broom to prod
the webs into shattered bone. (Yet threads of spindly white
 
still cling to their parent strands, and spiders gather and unite
these fractures like mending bone—and this is the method’s flaw:
the orb-weavers spin their way across my doorframe in the night).
 
But to kill the builders themselves would achieve no end but spite
(Who would guard the courtyard then? What would claim the weavers’ spot
once torn from their webs and enshrouded in scraps of spindly white?)
 
For the corpses of their kills endear them to me—insects caught mid-flight
are tributes rotting, unconsumed, before a voracious god.
The orb-weavers spin their way across my doorframe in the night,
and I cannot kill these crypt-keepers, silk-clad in spindly white.

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