The terror is in the way it holds you.
Eight months pregnant,
I hang a clothesline in the back lawn.
In the nursery window, a garden spider
embraces its tightwoven prey. Anonymous
in gauze-white. Moth, horsefly,
creature that thought it had given
wide berth the arcing legs,
the center-poised X. They become husk.
My clothespins like the barn swallows,
solemn, well-spaced
on the wire between our home
and the distant, unseen next.