[harpoon]

There are two large spiderwebs outside my door. The first hangs between a gardenia bush and the front porch’s furthest pillar. The second, higher, nearly hides beneath the streetlight just beyond the driveway’s mouth. Harpazo, a Greek word meaning “to seize, to capture or plunder or carry away”, lies at the root of its English cousin rapture. It also serves as the root of harpoon. Both spiderwebs outside my door are strewn with leaves, detritus, the spiders themselves. And the air. One has trapped a bumblebee. There are two spiders on this web, one much smaller—the male, naturally. I close the blind, look to my side and see the dog, asleep. I hear my love behind a door, the steady drag of his breathing in the dreaming dark; we are still here. But I know there are, among a great many things with wings, a world, its hunger, an ocean creeping toward us from one hundred miles away.