Cornelius Eady
Poet / Playwright / Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder, Cornelius Eady, was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and Chair of Excellence in Poetry at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia. Find Cornelius on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Spider
Here is my trouble with Spiders; I know they’re good; I’d heard all the tales, I’ve had reasonable people give me the facts; I know I live in a lucky house if they decide to visit; I know the bad luck is really reserved for flies, for stuff that likes to bite and sting and suck my blood, esp. when I’m in dreamland. I love the Spider God stories—one of them takes one of their eight legs, winds up, and whose, a rock becomes the Moon, that orb that rocks the tide, and pulls kisses from us in the dark; thanks, Spider!
But my God, take a look in my office and tell me that small, dark spot with legs hasn’t been sitting in the same place, for a day, for two days, hasn’t budged an inch, is waiting there, close to the skylight, waiting, and is trying to figure out how best to get at me, has decided that I am, in some way only spiders can determine, the thing between it and whatever it wants, that it needs to deal with me. I try to type poetic things, but a half-eye is keeping tabs. I pick up my guitar and write a song, a blues, but I don’t use the words I’m really feeling; when will the spider drop down and kill me?
On the third day, I walk into my office and the spider space is abandoned, and this, I say to myself, is what I deserve; how dare I paste human fault on an insect’s life? You need to know this is the tip of Spring, things that have slept, or yoked in the shell have now begun to shake off the cold, and take their place on the wheel. Everything is hungry; everything is a meal. I had an Aunt who loved to say on these occasions ain’t nobody studying you.
When will the spider drop down and kill me?
Do you want to know how we humans have survived all these years? Somehow, the brain has worked out a way to check what moves at the corners of our vision. It tells us, uh-oh, it keeps us jumpy, it cuts down rude surprises. On the third day, I’m about to relax, fingers to the keyboard, when at the edge of my left eye, up jumps the spider! It has made its mind up! It has climbed down the wall, crossed the space between the wall and my desk, and it is here, inches from my elbow, that let’s get it over with tumble of legs, new territory to be conquered.
Luckily, my butt is in a chair with wheels, my fear kicks the chocks away, and my hull slides to its christening. This is what happens when you put things off, my war brain says, you can’t negotiate with an arachnid! Did I really believe we could live in peace? That we’d figure out ways to respect and avoid the other? That a spider could read my human intentions?
And this is where our tale turns slightly bitter; where the big human bumbles death onto a small creature it is trying to save. If it wasn’t war, it was by the time I return from the kitchen with a shot glass to catch it, slide a paper floor beneath it, and walk it to the front door. Just as the glass falls, the spider tries to scoot under a lamp cord. It’s only part right, loses limbs, and I watch it go, wounded, devoured by a monster with a clear belly. In the folk tales, this is bad luck on the house of the Killer.