the girl and the spider-a love story

7/30/2019 The girl and the spider-a love story

1/4

The girl and the spider-a love story

An unstained girl at the window, clear as glass,

Wipes the candled sleep from her moist eyes,

As she spies again the spider in the old oak tree.

Her Mum it was she asked,

Careful curious and apple-warm,

Who is he then, Mother, in our garden now,

With his berrybrushed eyebrows and spectacles,

His as-if eyes and puzzled smile?

I remember him with me in the forceped room,

And I know he sits beside me still, silently,In the drudged schoolroom of my dread-foolish days.

I shall approach him now, as lover and disciple,Flesh-scrubbed and clothed in His lamb-red grace.

I know this, Mother, as I know scant else.

He returns for love and need of me.

You are to sense return, child.

Such things are to be discussed neither by you

Nor by those who bleeding bore you.

You may follow the path of your fast-blooming lust,

But you are not to speak of it within these walls again.And guard well the girlish fantasies in your rum-blood heart.

As she approaches, the spider glances sheepish towards her,

Dressed sack-clothed, and seeming ashen.

Hed walked, wishful and beauty-starved,

Through countless ghost-lit villages,

Through the belly of the weary and crusted earth

To this rigged and oiled dwelling

In the shadowed valley of her birth,

Where bells tolled and tears welledWhen shed butted her hairless head through mothered mawIn the blinding glare to faint applause.

Through spotted windows of latticed dream

Hed watched her ticking weary,

While all the while clinging long-full to the drooped and rusted gutters,

Through snarled parks to yellowed buses

The girl and the spider-a love story, poetry of Frank Feldman, p. 1 of 4 pp.


2/4

On the silent skirts of shrieking playgrounds.

Now he sits on his oaken throne,

Tapping timid and smiling strange,A fitful meeting of flustered equals in the squalid garden of hope.

Timid now she speaks,

Kindest, gentlest spider,

If voiceless you are, sing otherwise to me.

As it suits you, it shall me.

There is surely more to you than kindest witness and solace,

And I would know it, now.

I am but a tired, old spider,

Long undone and broken foolish under the lonely weight of years.You are young, sturdy-strong as the breast-boned oak on which I sit,

And already grown wise.

You see what you would, kind Spider.

Though my flesh is young, I am as ever

Sunken cruelish under a broken fate of tears.

If you love me, as I love you,

Tell me heavens well-hid reason for my many births.

Mingle-marry and merge with me

To sit double-backed and bestialAt the blackened feet of the dark-stained Savior.

Wisdom there is none in lifes filth-muddled schoolyard.

All the lonelier and more helpless do I become

With each day passed and skin shed.

Do not ask these things of me, my child.

Can you not teach me who I am, then?

Or give me peace?Ravish me such that I might be unstuck

From this weary-wounded self for all time?

Must you deny me both historys solace and heavens bliss?

God will deny you neither



3/4

(touching her cheek, then kissing her forehead...)

Though our love be eternal unto death and beyond,

Salted tears must sever now our precious earthly bond.

(gently tolling bells in the veiled distance...)

God calls me now to I know not where,

Calls to me kind through the cool night air.

Think on me, child, now fate pulls us apart,

My life soon to end and yours yet to start,

And sing to me, child, once youre snug and inside,

Songs that tell how weve lived and died.

Sing to me now of our lifelong love,

Of our many many lives-long love,Of our oft-shattered hearts that are then made whole,

Of the love that binds us soul to soul,

Merged in bliss and turned to dust

In a fiery marriage bed of lust

That burns our flesh right up till when

We die and then are born again.

He quickly creeps from the tree

To scuttle swiftly through the hedges

To the tendrilled fields now to urn his keepAs she turns herself towards her trail of tears.

(Wet as loins and dry as echoes)

Mother-frowns mount in the molten gloom

As the clock ticks tense and the door screams shut.

The ghostly hum and the spectral glow

Of the old TV in the short-lived room

Where the the chimney smoke makes its swift escapePushing mad over crested hills

To rasping smack against buried steeples.

(For now she remains a wisping girl,

Though her destiny be the wide worlds bellows.)



4/4

He had borne this death,

He had lived this loss,

Hed endured this pain many times before,

Though the cast was diffrentAnd the scene was changed,

Hed watched countless times as shed closed that door.

Opens she now the latticed glass,

The windowed bars of her frozen pain

To bare her soul in a newborn song

Which warms the earth like a summer rain...

Though his legs grew weary

And his eyes grew tired,

And hed feared thered be on trouble on his journey long,His gait grew merry

And his smile grew wider

When the breeze caressed him with her fragrant song.

As her song echoed fragrant neath the star-struck moon,

He weaved around its melody a second tune-

We shall one day embrace and become one another,

With our limbs crisscrossed and face to face

In the womb of the universal MotherOn her milk-white throne in the star-flung place...,

(As the spider slowly scuttles from the readers sight...,)

And cradled in the galaxies of deepest space...

(Their song goes fading gentle into that good night.)

By the blessed gift eternal of our Fathers grace...

FINIS


the girl and the spider-a love story

Documents