The girl who loved spider webs Had much to mull with herself.
She wondered at the two strands Of anchoring the spider makes
And why she smelled rock when she saw A web grow between the sliced hills.
Before she knew about the boys, Their stone-sure hearts,
Their spinning hands, she tried Her skill at weaving a spider-web
But couldn't get the knack so turned At last to soccer in the far field.
Rocky-thin and safe from mountains And smart enough to shelter from thunder,
She would kick the ball to herself At the other end, then run like a boy
Had never done and kick it back again. In the early morning, the webs would work
At gathering the mist and pretending That their design was beauty, nothing more.
Some flies got fooled, but she never did, Not once in all the years she kicked that ball
And ran after it. After those apprenticeships, She studied mountains for their art and brought
A man to herself who knew to kick a ball as hard as she did and could gentle a spider in his hand.
PRACTICING THE ART IN NEW JERSEY
"The profound change has come upon them" W.C. Williams
You, baby doctor, pulling boys out by their toes, finding two or three baby girls up your sleeve by legerdemain, getting it all down to a science, I hear you have plumbed a couple of poems the other morning, put them down on the pad you use to prescribe the medicines we need.
That's an artful thing to do, making changes that matter, getting them underway the way you've been taught, giving us all a chance we would not have had without that little tug toward a change that you, you baby doctor, prescribed in your hot medicinal scrawl.
Martin Galvin's most recent book, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, will be out in June. He has had poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The New Republic, JAMA, Commonweal, The Christian Science Monitor, Midwest Review, OntheBus, and many others, including several earlier issues of Innisfree. His book Wild Card won the Columbia Award (1989) judged by Howard Nemerov.
