elegies

6h

𝘛𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩. You would have liked that phrase,
lecturing me on how a spider’s thread
is stronger bonded than a rope of steel…

—Alison Prince, “Webs”
published in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘵 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯 (Mariscat Press, 2003)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/webs/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #winter #spiders #elegies #grief #womenwriters

Webs
Alison Prince

Tensile strength. You would have liked that phrase,
lecturing me on how a spider’s thread
is stronger bonded than a rope of steel.
Here on the frosted path, webs brush my face
and cling. Catenaries. A strange appeal
you found in these dry terms, my love. Long dead,
you are still with me. Irritating, yes,
a trifle pompous – but it was a boy’s
delight in structures that provoked you to
point out these abstract truths. The stickiness
of spider silk necklaced with frozen dew
is real to me, as is your still-heard voice,
your striding tread. Almost invisibly
these anchored threads tie leaf to white-edged leaf;
my passing breaks them, brushing them away
to nothing, but their creeping filigree
will be rebuilt. Each perfect, untouched day
renews the cobwebs of an old, sweet grief.

A photograph of "a frosted spider’s web", by Walter Barker. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_frosted_spider’s_web_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7052192.jpg

Against a dark background, a spider's web, centred near the top left-hand corner of the image. Parts of the web are torn, and the threads weighted and highlighted by frost. Thicker threads stand out, the ice on them like a fine fuzz; thinner ones are just lines of white, and the very thinnest are barely visible strings of tiny white dots.

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