The Spider’s Harp by Sharon Lax

September 22, 2022
Poet name: Sharon Lax Poem title: The Spider’s Harp Poem: Inside the silk of a spider’s web The sono-lithic mystery of Arachne, music of the muse Along her harp, a luthier of gland and purpose She strums, she plucks, she tunes Shaking, moving inside the ampullate of web Ubiquitous tremulations she composes A concert, absolution of body Vibrating dissections release her hypotheses To the echoes of the Hz, multiplied by translucence Her answers, as infinite as the waves of dance Through cloaks of knowing, shelled in muscle, bonded in piriform She releases a string, and the vibrations carry her to somnolence Then, quickly, awoken by the wind outside, she sails alight Above the attrition of memory Tuning this instrument of spheres, she silently praises her creation Appendaged by corners, cones from the perspective of prey The flagelliform alerting her to another in her orbit Skilled musician, she composes the libretto caved within her eyes A multiplicity of sense, the rhythm mapped by skeleton She lifts a leg to tune, then plucks a fitful arpeggio Smooths abdomen against thread; rises, falls She listens to the presence: deep caverns of sound Within the bass, there is movement, and she slips Closer to the center, her weight a slender bow Across these incandescent strings She lingers, takes measurement of the scales From outer to within: a hydraulic crawl to answers Pulsing of head and thorax The treasure of the treble clef, the underlying meter Aletheia, in her poem of sound . . . End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Sharon Lax Sharon Lax lives in Deux-Montagnes, Québec, and acknowledges the continued dispossession of the People, the Kanien’kehà:ka and the Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, from these lands, near Tiohtià:ke, the site of meetings and exchanges among Nations. While Sharon finds poetry to be a resolute guide, she also finds limitations in the art to fully make sense of the world: of human relations and their relations with other residents of this planet. Yet, it’s in this kind of traveling through the almost carbon-free transit of words that she feels most agile in exploring the elusive. Shattered Fossils, her short story collection that begins with a tweet-length narrative and ends with a ghost story, was published by Guernica Editions in 2020. Her poetry, fiction and memoir has appeared in numerous journals, among them, Vallum, carte blanche, Montréal Serai and The Dalhousie Review. Stop by for a visit at sharonlax.com.