The Black-Bellied Tarantula

The Spider has a name~
to crush in the chase
any scientific reasons
with two fangs.
A few are to be feared.

I have admired their
frenzied dances.
Efficacious and nimble,
bequeathed to us,
the little dance is to discuss
the huntress's touch.

*

Open places, dry, arid
to the sun, passages,
burrows to a depth
of the elbow~

I used to see those eyes,
wider than the burrow itself,
seized by a texture.
This seems to have been the Spider,
maintaining the fortress.

Whole hours~a knife
is the mother of invention,
with its reflexion to enter
patience, the tunnel.

I seldom failed.
Stubbornly I would capture
fifteen Tarantula in an hour.
The trap was not troubling~
a sound not unlike the humming
of bees.

I caught a male and,
swept with his air of motionless gravity,
I often heard him alter the color of his body.
I sent to him.
I was sorry to learn he was not found.

Curious, I had two full-grown males,
mutually present,
struggling to truce,
renewed to fierceness.

A curious duel in
the dry, rarely visible forest,
a desolate stretch,
pits bent and cemented with silk.

With silk she confines the hand.
With silk there is no difference
between the legs, the work.
Silk prevents the humming trap.
It remains motionless.

*

And turn and twist a slight
resistance has fallen slowly
from her legs.

(I hide the Spider.
If she saw me,
I would give her
her own house.)

I procure the burrow and I
turn the apparatus over her ear.
It is the humming of the huntress,
so rich to the orifice.

Ardent, she destroys vivisection
in her tower, with powerful jaws.
The poisoned must fall.

The Lycosa, waiting for danger,
is obliged to annihilate the word.
The fatal buzzing, slack, fresh,
does not kill so quickly.

*

For a second, an explanation of the Bumble-bees,
so delicate; her face, on either side of morning,
cools her sting.
With her legs she protects the garden.
With wings memories she mounts her lair.
Fortune smiles from her hole,
the nape of death.

*

One swallow does not make a summer.

*

Lycosa has shown me the art
of the open-air study~

I witnessed leaves, motionless,
proclaim our attention.
I have seen the sting requires light.
The subject of the wall succumbs,
after a lapse,
to the huntress.

Violent evolutions
showed my master's teaching,
wild, fluid, and pretty,
to hurt science.
Temporary paralysis will soon disappear;
nevertheless I was captive,
alive in captivity.

Therefore I made the Tarantula
the receptacle of consummate knowledge~

I speak in the plural~
both of them, one alone,
sometimes three, receive.

The Spider, on the other hand, there alone,
would increase instinct,
inseparable from
theoretic mists.