(photograph by Laura Baker)
Some years ago, during a very dark time in my life, I lived alone in a small apartment. In the bathroom the wallpaper border was peeling from the old paint, and mildew grew on the ceiling. My clothes sat in neat piles on the floor inside a big duffle bag. Parts of my life had crumbled despite my best efforts to hold everything together. The weeks and months dragged on as I laid staring at the ceiling night after night, wondering how I had come to be here and where I was going. I felt utterly alone. But during the early weeks I discovered a quiet companion in a corner of the shower: a spider. My Charlotte to her Wilber. I called her Clementine. I could have casually killed her to avoid her silky creepiness, for I don’t care for spiders. Instead, in my loneliness, I greeted Clementine fondly each morning and evening, and missed her when she disappeared for a day or two.
This and the next five poems I post will chronicle my brief relationship with Clementine.
HELLO CLEMENTINE
A spindly-legged spider
hovers upside-down
above me, in the corner—
I don’t know what she eats
in this tidy little shack;
it’s only the two of us—
she faces away, but
I know she is only pretending
to not watch me.
Part of me squeams
to squash her:
three squares of toilet tissue
would do. But,
she is quiet and harmless;
this is her shack, too.
And, it’s only the two of us.
(Unfortunately I never took a picture of the real Clementine. My daughter, Laura, took this and subsequent spider photographs of garden spiders around our house.)
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