Teenage ingenue,
poodle skirt and pony tail,
fallen into the web of a giant spider.
The type of movie we used
as an acceptable excuse to heavy pet.
Anyone who cared, maybe
one or two, knew she’d get through
in time, saved not by her boyfriend,
way too cool, and dumb as a brick,
but by the high school science teacher,
a Christ figure in a cardigan, whose gift
of omniscience could calculate
the exact amount of DDT it takes
to stun a spider the size of your house.
He’ll get her out. And Mother,
lacey apron, pearls, and heels, will
forgive her for crawling into that
cave to look for Dad, as long as she
does all her homework and goes
straight to bed. Don’t worry about Dad.
He’ll be back when his bender wears off.
Outside, the spider’s on the loose,
the pesticide’s all worn off—
So much for science and omniscience—
The sheriff issues some fatherly advice,
Shelter in Place, though
real estate values are falling fast
under eight hairy legs.
The price for taking risks isn’t
falling into a sticky net;
it’s the humiliation of having to be rescued
through the combined efforts of
every Tom, Dick, and Fred in town,
firemen, policemen, power workers
and Terminix. They’re in cahoots
to restore the community
to its God-given state of normalcy.
In the end,
she’ll graduate cum laude
and marry her boyfriend—
dumb as he is—
He’ll take over his father’s
Maytag distributorship,
They’ll have a mess of kids.
and forget all about
the big arachnid, and Dad,
dead, sucked dry in the cave.
William Derge’s poems have appeared in Negative Capability, The Bridge, Artful Dodge, Bellingham Review, and many other publications. He is the winner of the $1000 2010 Knightsbridge Prize judged by Donald Hall and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a winner of the Rainmaker Award judged by Marge Piercy.