Wolf Spider
I've let it live, the little spider of the morning
Which suddenly started running across the page
Right to the passage I was about to change,
So that I thought I was watching a letter escape,
Almost in the shape of a four-point x, graced,
Of course, with members twice as many in number.
I watch it moving around, a perfect tumbler,
Between the books, the notebooks, the pack of tobacco.
Hardly has it disappeared, and it's already back,
On the back of a notebook, careening at full speed
Along the spiral, like one does, but vertically,
When one lets oneself go when going down a slide.
Then again, with a zig-zagging leap, it takes flight,
Just as my sharpened pencil was about to end its capers.
Then nothing. It must have found shelter under the paper
Where the verses it interrupted were gathering speed.
Despite my incitement, my tricks, they no longer listen to me,
Nonplussed at having let this sign-but God knows how-
Be born and flee, which, tomorrow, between two flowers,
Obeying its own fate in the corner of a window,
Will begin to compose an assassin's trembling poem
Shields, Andrew and Jaques Réda. "The Spider." Poetry 175, no. 3 (2000): 188.
