TO A SPIDER
Who Spun Her Web Among The Government Documents
Elizabeth Public Library
Business Department
Dear little Spider,
Who aspire too high.
Your web slung from these documents
Is slung precariously.
I myself won’t bother you;
You needn’t fear me,
But fear instead some other one,
Who wishes to use these documents.
The commerce of the world
Must go on and on and on,
And your home
Will be destroyed.
Let this then be your epitaph:
U.S. GOVT. DEPOSITORY DOC.
SEP 29 1987
FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY, ELIZABETH, N.J.
Pardon, dear little Spider,
Pardon.
John J. Trause, the Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of six books of poetry and one of parody, Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His translations, poetry, prose, scholarship, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review, the artists’ periodical Crossings, the Dada journal Maintenant, the journal Offerta Speciale, the Great Weather for Media anthologies It’s Animal but Merciful (2012), I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand (2014), and Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (2019), and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, New Jersey, and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series.
