You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

THERE ARE MORE WAYS TO SHOW DEVOTION than we can ever know in this lifetime once you traced a finger along the traffic of webs in the distance stitched along the top right corner of the window frame troubling the sun its beams breaking apart at the web’s center a single open eye flicking light along our open hands the spider builds a new web every day bigger each time in the left corner and then the right the spider once worked above us while we slept & then in the morning the spider spun itself into silent waiting or longing maybe invisible but for its hunger which is another word for desire if desperation were off the table & all that remained were two open arms waiting for an agreeable heart but it is like me to imagine the spider believes itself a failure what with its dance from corner to corner its web eclipsing more & more of the woodwork with each passing day & still nothing to show for it but another night of tearing down & rebuilding & another morning of light stumbling into a window laughing at the barren web which is a plea a moan a disaster of a lonely maze I respect the patience of heartbreak how it waits through the sweetness through the familiar beauty & then reveals itself through what doesn’t return or never arrives at all & it is only you & a series of blinking memories the moments you had once & believed yourself able to touch again I think another word for this is hunger I make the bed in the mornings now every day it looks new again like no one has ev...