Nine species of spider we had—in the woodshed, the wilting coop—
and translucent scorpions small as pushpins, and black snakes

roping over the threshold. But it was the spiders,
figurative and stowaway: the dingy one with her babies

a crimped alphabet on her back, and the widow nervous, sermonizing,
and the furry one with hooded eyes that lived in a borrowed cave,

rolling saliva into sand boulders, building a world to hide behind.
Our afternoons were marvelously populated. How many creatures

sunning in the burnt grass? When I walked I could hear myself.
I knew I lived then. I knew my sisters lived because I could feel them

bounding into me like monsters. Lively as monsters, fat joy
in their squealing. And then there were the soap operas. All you had to do

was click on the TV and there stood someone loving somebody else
and not afraid to say it.

*

Stairs were missing from our house. Black was missing
from most of the corners—though brindled, spectral gray was everywhere:

extinguished moths in the lamp, cheesecloth nightdress
my mother wore, metallic aftertaste scaling a veiled wall.

*

And then there was the nightly crying out—
but to what exactly? Who did we think would come or not

for all our whimpering? And wasn't there also an insistence beyond
the window that was like nothing so much as footsteps, but perforated,

preferring not to be fixed upon,
preferring not to be remembered except in the body

which cannot—how could it?—be trusted. My mother is like this
in memory, a doubtful body. Smudged sound deeper than the drowsing

grid of window screen, a half-lidded eye. It wasn't to her I cried.
It wasn't to her I was digging when in sleep I turned and tried

to wriggle out the tucked bottom of my sheets. Stuck,
I would wake knowing precisely how lost I was.

*

Where did I mean to get to those nights? To what island
of the mind? And this habit of holding the bedclothes

in my teeth, did it begin when my body began, strangely arched
away from itself and toward a sister's body, warm and predatory?

Begin with toecurl, cradle of foot on foot?
What kind of vessel am I? Are you? To what providence

do we mean to bear ourselves? And with what in our tender
terrible webs? Here is the child as petition, upside down

in the dreambed, and terror like liniment.
What might answer her if she spoke now? What? And who?