Davis McCombs

Black and Yellow Argiope

The spider by the compost bin
is trawling the warm air currents
off the creek with his net tonight.

He is far out to sea.
My flashlight on the dumped
eggshells, coffee grounds,

and rinds is the last beacon
he will sight
before dawn appears

like a landfall of far blue hills
that crest and disappear
and grow closer. He must

content himself with each
day’s catch of gnats and midges
(it is enough) but surely

he is waiting for the night
that may never come
when a dragonfly

swimming low and fast
from the shadowy
banks and moss

mistakes his grid of strands
for a ripple in the air
and does not swerve.

—Davis McCombs, originally published in Dismal Rock (Tupelo Press, 2007)
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Davis McCombs’s first collection of poetry Ultime Thule won the Yale Younger Poets Award for 1999. Dismal Rock, his second collection, has won Contemporary Poetry Review’s Best Second Book of Poetry for 2007, the 2008 Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing (poetry), the 2007 Kentucky Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2005 Dorset Prize, selected by Linda Gregerson. He is on the faculty of the Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation. He loves woodpeckers and is amuse by photographs of scat.

The black and yellow argiope around here look like this:

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