I passed them each time I walked from the surf
to the beach, their miles-long ragged lines
limning phases of the tide's retreat.
They came every year, I barely noticed, millions

of them at summer's end, to the sea, the prevailing
breeze hot off the land, drowning,
their great flotilla beached
by waves and swimmers rinsing out their trunks.

I was thirteen, with a mind fed too much on itself,
on judgments more agonizing than fists
sticks, or stones, though aware
that at an eyeblink war could take to the air

and of the holocaust a Russian bomb would make
of New York. It was years later
reading Edwards that I found the clearest image for us
then — a fist of spiders dangled by

some unimagined, ordinary, feckless boy
over fires of our own making. Taking his time. Toying.