Spiders are useful bugs, my mother said.
They spin webs that serve a purpose,
ridding the world of use-less flies.
It was a distinction I did not grasp:
couldn’t you say it was the flies that served
a purpose by being food? What I did perceive
was the excessive elegance of eight legs
and the fabulous architecture of their webs,
which were not all teleology, spanning footpaths
at dawn, bush to bush, as if they could not help
but spew silver all night long, too fragile to catch
anything, but stopping me up just the same
with their touch, scrabbling at my face to brush
away their invisible yet indelible trace.
— from Juniper Volume 6, Issue 2