Hyper-Text Page by Michelle Procaccio
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white
On a white heal-all,* holding up a moth
Like a piece of rigid satin cloth—
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth hither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If
design govern in a thing
so small.
(* heal-all is a type of wild flower commonly found
in New England)
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the sold tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the
fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
*An American song bird that builds a dome-shaped nest