The room is your own, but it is still bare.
It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared.
-Virginia Woolf

 

The day after we take possession of the house,
I find two bats mummified in the basement,
a mother and, perhaps, her child. They live

 

in our dustpan for a week before I decide
to carry them outside. Meanwhile,
we ferry furniture up stairways and through

 

narrow doors until I feel I have mastered
the maneuverings of each four-legged
wooden beast—dining table, sofa, armchair,

 

desk. There are cobwebs on every stair.
The spiders spin faster than me here
and I have been hurrying so long.

 

I sink anchors into the walls. My partner
buys a fly swatter, chases the insects
around the house. I buy knives

 

with rosewood handles and blades honed
in the country where my grandfather
was born. I have been building bookshelves

 

in our highest room, fitting dowels
into each pre-drilled hole. I assemble them
on their backs, laid down, then raise them

 

their weight tipping lighter, then level,
as they tower over me. On my front porch,
a great grey dame of a spider, quite rotund,

 

has spun her corner web. She sits at its center,
her hourglass abdomen turned
toward our door. I watch as moths, mosquitoes,

 

other wings catch in her careful architecture.
She never leaves them long, no struggle lest
their dying break her fragile home.

 

She kills them quick, then carries them away.
Just today, checking the mail, I saw that her web
was gone. I cannot know if it was the mailman

 

who swatted the strands aside, or a swallow,
or some other bird that passed through,
or if it was she herself who made another plan,

 

unstrung each filament and let them fall
leaving only an isosceles frame—three guy-lines
and somewhere, perhaps, in a corner out of sight

 

the remains of her meals, a tidy pile of wings.