NASHVILLE. In fact, there are black widow spiders here. They tend toward introversion and will not become aggressive unless they, or their egg sacs, are threatened. The spider I found by the (struggling, heat-blasted) Nymphenburg rose last summer hung in its random and cloudlike web with two front legs loosely curled around its white egg sac, which was about the same diameter as the spider’s drop-of-asphalt abdomen. She resembled a protective human parent surrounding a newly-upright toddler with outstretched arms–not touching, just shielding at a short distance.

I killed her. The egg sac contained hundreds of juvenile black widows. Cats love spiders: to chase, to toy with, eventually to eat, or at least to sample.

The hobo spider is a friendly sort, but poisonous. Most are European imports although American hobos may be found in the northwest. Chevrons adorn its abdomen, and its long legs occasionally have horizontal stripes; perhaps it’s wreaking Malvolio’s revenge in the new world with its gaudy sartory. The wolf spider stalks and pounces upon its prey, and can inflict a painful but not poisonous bite. It too is a fiercely protective parent. House-spiders prey on mosquitoes and are hard to provoke. Garden spiders, or argiope aurantia, create spectacularly large orb-shaped webs and are helpful garden predators. Jumping spiders, tiny and compact as a welter-weight boxers, leap straight up, often rising to relatively great heights, especially when agitated.

The common housefly’s (musca domestica’s) gymnastic abilities include lighting upside-down on horizontal planar surfaces via a quick half-roll to aim its sticky (and dirty) feet upward. The family comprising blow-fly species (calliphoridae spp.) are actually related to the mosquito, which is also of the order diptera, or true (two-winged) flies. The true blue-bottle, which lays its eggs in rotting meat, is called Calliphora vomitoria.The green-bottle is Lucillia caesar, a name that may, if you want to be contrary, be translated as “Light king.” Species of flies as as numerous as their habits and behaviors: “…Thats why these flies are weird they dont seem intersted in the mess, …they are only interested in the ceiling fans and ceiling lights(even when the lights are off) they circle and fly around the pull chains and the globes almost in a swarm like fasion….WHAT THE HECK IS UP WITH THESE FLIES!!!…” (www,getridofthings.com).

Musca domestica, our house-fly, has been characterized as, among other things, a “well-known cosmopolitan pest” (http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/urban/flies/house_fly.htm), “medically harmless” (http://insects.tamu.edu/fieldguide/cimg237.html), a “prolific breeder[ ]” (http://www.getridofthings.com/get-rid-of-house-flies.htm), and “not native American[ ]” (http://www.hydeparkmedia.com/housefly.html). Moreover, “their feet are filthy” (ibid.).

The narrator of Musca domestica, Christine Hume’s first published book of poetry, calls the collection a “flypaper palimpsest.” “Highway Address” is the second poem in the book.

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Highway Address

And yet we thought our presence changed it: the sod we laid in tiers like bricks and the birds our dogs planted at stick crosses as the passing lights wore holes in our couches and faces. We were something to look at. We watched their cycle shut around us. We named where they were going—fuming as they were to get there—to the great invisible fortresses and lifetimes of coming to the kingdom, kingdom come. Very well, the mind is a patient animal waiting for dark to jump the fence like the hitchhiker we would have picked up. but we are a house. He was tinged with the baseness of darkening blue. The sun behind him cranked bolts of ancient nerve and laughter. Falling rocks are a hitchhiker’s hazard, though some say the rock is only happy when hitting home. So it was with us. Lightening yellowed our teeth like the road’s wishing-line. Speed organized our air, a force on a field that had not forgotten the forest. It had pull with us.

–Christine Hume, Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000)

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