A spider has rappelled from the gutter to the evergreen shrub outside the window. One strand of web splits the glass, and it bothers me a little that it’s not exactly a 90-degree turn from the frame. I want to fetch a protractor and measure its angle. I bet it’s more like 110-degrees. It’s not a triangle; I can tell you that. I have seen enough spider webs to know any spinner knows her angles. This one must be frightfully embarrassed at her shoddy workmanship. Maybe she got distracted (or eaten) and could not finish. I can relate.

I have my own half-spun webs dangling around crevices. The only pattern, the only angle: wide, gaping, trailing-off-edness. Songs that stop mid-bridge. Stories that go quiet mid-sentence. Colors that fade mid-line mid-canvas. All eight legs of me, and I cannot get to the end of the block. Tragic, all this start and stop. Hair-raising (and then falling).

I could take a lesson, maybe, from the relentless forward roll of Season. “Finish what you start, Dear. Shed your leaves, snow, grow, and burn until you shed again.”

I think it’s time to spill.

you know this, right? that surrounded by water,  it grows or recedes depending on tide.

an island is always occupied.

and so this thing you’ve built

this isolation you’ve constructed

your own sweet brain, please follow

has turned on you,

folded itself into a very private note.

that thing you think you hold secret, is not

secret.

not private.

it’s on my note, too.

and hers.

and his.

we are the same poem over and over, and our

stanzas connect

and repeat.

isolation does not exist. open your note.

you are not floating. rest.

you are carried. even when you are running.

so you might as well not.

and besides which,

if you are only your illness,

only your isolation,

only your resignation to separate…

you will sink, (but not really)

because you cannot rest all that you are on that which does not exist.

Why was he awake, she wondered?

He thought the same sitting in his chair in the front room, staring across the black street, through the charcoal trees, to the one charcoal stamp car sitting in front of her house by the mailbox. Why is she awake?

They’d never met. Six years, and not a single exchange. Houses like cubicles on a fading block, the people inside rarely groundhogging up through the chimneys to say hello or ask for kleenex. He’d helped her dig her car out of the snow once, buried fender-deep at the end of the driveway. Why hadn’t she asked his name?

Long gray hair in a pony tail. Blue-collared shirt and work boots. He wore three fingernails long. Maybe that’s why. She hated long fingernails. But still, she should have asked.

He knew her name was Margaret; he’d kept a piece of mail arriving in his box by mistake. It wasn’t important mail–just an invitation to a book fair somewhere on the east side. He went instead. He bought a book about gardening and had half of a mind to leave it with the invite in her mailbox, but he didn’t.

Curly brown hair that hung just to her jawline. She wore glasses and could not keep them up when she shoveled the front walk in her man’s winter coat. He never helped–only once with the car. He should have helped more.

Should have. But six years is a long time to live with should. A window closed, took with it an invitation to connect. And now in the pre-dawn, as the neighborhood relearns its color, charcoal trees line a black street, where unnamed people nail their front doors shut.

Fuzzy.

Flaming.

Fandango. She could dance if she wanted, wind her body into the shape of an -f- then a g, an h, an entire choreography miming letters into sentences. “Be what you speak:” an instruction. “You become what you say:” a warning. It was never enough to write them.

I will climb into the juice of this word, she thought, a pencil dangling like a spent cigarette from her mouth. I’ll drive it from the inside.

She would compose sentences from forearms, couplets out of phalanges; she would run with entire paragraphs hidden in her femurs. She would channel epics through the pores of her forehead. She would be epic, if only she could write it all inside. Be the pen!

Be the ball!

Eyes on prize. Shoot from hip. Are what eat. Become what say. Bloom where grow. Amen.

Her thoughts too big, voice too loud, hands too clumsy, disaster too widespread. She left craters where there were anthills, and she breathed apologies. Everything was wrong; at least were she as small as Nothing, the wrong would shrink. It would fit into a baby mouse’s thimble. A flea on a baby mouse’s thimble. An atom of air on a flea on a fly on a baby mouse’s thimble.

She crossed the street and into the parking lot where cracks spread like tributaries on a topographical map. She followed them, counted them. She itemized her surroundings when anxiety started to swell. Too many to count, and she stopped. She stopped enough to wonder how the cracks formed. Did they pop up all of a sudden? Not a speck on Tuesday, but suddenly, at 6:23 on Wednesday morning, crack: There they were? Or did they rip slowly through the tar and concrete? Rising from white to gray to black? Had anyone thought to snap their evolution frame by frame?

Of course not, she said to no one. Things like this take time to break; we just wait to notice.