Sprawled in my favorite chair,

I found a spider striving down

my sweater's cotton roads;

uncruel, I meant to brush her

from my collar to the floor,

but a brainless finger crushed her.

Drunk on ideas the size of salt,

her witty legs, those marvelous legs

had skittered her down the wall

to vistas of heaving; the ebb

and flow of my breathing.

A ruined husk. I didn't reckon

the difference between our lives,

the stellar gap between a spider's

life and mine: and this was my task,

for if it exists, a reckoning spider is

truly a monster, a foe to be fought.

But she was no monster,

and I was only a man in a chair,

reading, with no ill intent: and yet

that tiny walker died, a small

color in the world gone to gray

at my blameless finger's end.