After killing the spider, we spoke


It was a one-sided conversation.
I did all the speaking.  The spider was dead.
& this is what I said, starting the moment before
killing the spider, lifting out a book
from the top of the wall of the loft, I said,
Celine is good for killing spiders.
I leaned out over the wall,
arm outstretched, holding the hard-cover out
as if swinging a bat in an on-deck circle,
or a rock, about to be tossed
at another boy on another side of a remembered hill,
or a cast member in the New Testament, throwing it,
until, like the mob, I whacked.
Dead spider, I said,
I’m going to leave you there,
3 feet over the wall that overlooks downstairs below.
where your family may find you,
& know, just know, that where you stay is a bad place,
perhaps some chemical reaction occurs in your kind,
so that, instead of having to rely on some . . . absent mind,
to tell you, tell you that this place is bad,
when finding your own dead, there,
your body just does your thinking for you,
& it becomes something that you just know – 
in your exoskeleton,
or as we like to say where I am from,
in our bones.
So, I’m going to leave you there,
pasted, like a wanted poster,
hanging, like the wanted, caught,
& I am doing all this on a biological hope.
This is mammal country,
& you don’t pay rent.
I’m sorry.