"Webs of Life" - Eugene C. Bianchi

"Webs of Life" - Eugene C. Bianchi

As I approach the end of my journey after eight lucky decades of a long dance, I notice small stuff ignored in a faster day. This morning I walked up the driveway to collect the Times between showers as sunlight at a perfect angle hit the spider web strung across the road like a pendant of lacy wet crystals with the orange-brown arachnid builder waving her go-slow sign (nor did I want that net slung across my face). So I stopped to look and marvel at this art piece defying gravity and expectation. Then I bowed to its beauty to avoid unseen tie lines that kept the godly apparition suspended like a fragile model of our inner and outer linkings. We pride ourselves on mind as our unique gift without respecting patterns of life deeply set by the unifying matrix of the lovely and not. So, forgive if I wander too far in musings of an amateur entomologist and talk about my old friend a large cockroach who has lived peaceably in a corner of my kitchen minding his own business, as they say. If you are now grossed out ready to throw this poem against the wall in disgust, pause, dear reader, and defer at least to the longevity of his ancient tribe scrambling around the feet of dinosaurs, and observe our parting after a long encounter. He wandered out slower than usual to say hello and scoffed at the roach box with small holes near the phone which rarely rings for him. He seemed to pray for liberation, moksha, wanting to return to the damp forest of liriope knowing his time had come for the trek. So I wrapped him gently in Kleenex and we processed like two old sadhus on pilgrimage to the banks of the Ganges, to the edge of the garden where he scampered off perhaps to meet the spider. "Webs of Life" is online, and is also included in Gene's most recent poetry collection, Chewing Down My Barn: Lessons from Carpenter Bees.