Black Widow

She waits, eight black spindles joined at one end by a pivot, a compass. Each pinpoint balanced at the intersections of self-drawn polygons. Legs jointed like the fingers of a skeleton, deft, dexterous as a harpist. Body in two sections with ample abdomen, the African who carries the water jug on her head. Or an Indian, the untouchable with her caste mark, the microscopic grains dropping through the hourglass like drops of blood. Blind, she has the surrogate sense of a seismograph. She would feel a disturbance in the web were it only a thought. Never mind she lives in a dark corner as devoid of light as she is of personality, she needs neither. She does not look as the wrapped body of her cannibalized mate as at a gilt-framed photograph of the dearly departed. The egg sac is not a silk-lined bassinet, the hanging ornament to all her future hopes and dreams. She is absent of frontal lobes, moralizing modifiers, second thoughts. An instrument of logic, mate=food sac=young, syllogisms minus all prepositions, additional excess cargo to be jettisoned as the dried shells of devoured prey. No welcome mats on the front step, no settees in the parlor, no cunning seductress with scarlet claws. Only a modem waiting in the spaceless black.