This poem appeared in the Fall - 2019 issue of The Avocet. 

​Great Horned Owl
 
In Birds of America, their visage seems fierce.
In person, these birds can be much worse.
 
I have heard them called the terror of the skies.
They eat anything that swims, runs, or flies.
 
When they move in, other owls get quiet.
You see, they are on the great horned’s diet.
 
Neither eagle nor heron is safe from their grasp.
The owl eats their chicks, quick as an asp.
 
These birds build no nests, find a hollow tree,
or take over another’s nest rent free.
 
Through cold and snow, owl chicks grow fast.
They fly in March; the nesting is past.
 
The skunk is among their items of prey.
You will want to avoid them the following day.

​Spider - written in my journal in September

This morning I shared my porch table with a tiny gray spider, perhaps a quarter inch long. The spider was fully formed, as arachnids are even at hatching. I am tempted to say that it was an adult, given the time of year, but the unseasonably hot days of September make the statement less confident.

The spider seemed indisposed to stay, crossing to the far end. When I interposed my pen in the path, the arachnid raised the front pair of legs for a tactile examination. Not interested, the spider turned back toward me.

When I placed an open book in the path, the spider climbed onto the page with its world map. Uninterested in the land masses of North and South America, the intrepid spider crossed the Pacific Ocean north to south.

Not satisfied with this adventure, the spider crossed to the opposing page, which held a world map illustrated with time zones. Continuing its southerly movement, the spider followed the Hawaii/Tahiti time zone, which includes a bit of Alaska. The vast land mass of Alaska crosses three times zones. The convergence of the zones at their northern limits assists the state in doing so. Greenland likewise crosses three zones, but neither offers competition for Russia, which occupies parts of nine, sharing time zones with Cairo, Baghdad, Dubai, Karachi, Dhaka, Bangkok, Beijing, Tokyo, and Canberra.

My spider showed interest in none of these distant lands, simply traveling across Hawaii and Tahiti. It did not even enter the adjacent Alaska Time Zone or the Samoa Time Zone. I suppose there is something to be said for singleness of purpose.

The Hawaii/Tahiti time zone is eleven hours behind Greenwich Mean Time and one hour ahead of Samoa. So far as I could tell, the spider was unimpressed with these facts or its recent travels. Some people say Grandmother Spider crossed the world and brought back the sun. In that case, I suppose a bit of globe-trotting is not unusual for a small creature. 

When I interposed my pen again, this spider happily accepted a ride down to the porch floor and went about being a spider. I felt no revulsion at the spider’s exterior skeleton, so different from my interior skeleton, or for its venomous bite by which it captures prey. I thought of its similarities to a tick, a scorpion, and a crab, all distant relatives of the spider, with which I avoid contact but without ill will. They fascinate me, and I wish for more time to observe them.