how to read a poem to a spider

How to read a poem to a spider?
I long to share the beautiful rhythms
of our many words describing them
coxa-trochanter jointed limbs
pipette-fang chelicerae
opisthosoma spinnerets

Their Noongar names
create pleasant open vowels in the mammal mouth
Walbungkara
    Yoogera
    Kaar and Kara
   their taxonomic designations
  dance syllables across the tongue
    Sparassidae
    Cataxia
    Lycosidae

Though what can poetry be to arthropods
  they lack language tongues and tympanic ears
no eardrum drums
  from the timbre of my voice
when the half-rhyme slaps
  no pleasure centre lights up in the
      arachnid ganglion brain
a brain not even in the head
but spread long throughout the body
   aligned to the legs
      a limb mind
a meta-tarsal consciousness

How to read a poem to a spider
    who is earless but not deaf
they have a hundred ways of hearing
hairs attached to sensory organs
that bend at the pressure
   of the particle velocity of sound
if you hum they will hear you
   your voice registering as gooseflesh

You could read a poem to a spider
      but take out every vowel
   spiders perceive them as danger
    a e i o and u vibrate their hairs
    like the wingbeats of the parasitic wasp
    hovering hymenopterans
      looking for an incubating body
here poetry is perilous
   a sonnet could pierce them
      with the maggot stick
   a haiku could
               eat away at their insides

Could you gesticulate some freeform verse?
   sign your words to avoid the vowels
their vision is not so good
   most have stationary retinas
that register just light and dark
   even puppy-eyed jumping spiders
      use their vision to hunt for bugs, not meaning

Could you tap a poem in morse code?
rapping the words out on the ground might make them hungry
a meal that never materialises
   draw attention to empty-belly
drum hunger in the mandibles
   we might even mistake them
      for speaking poetry back

How would they read a poem to a human?
   spider poetry is in the geometry of the orb web
         the semaphore mating dance of peacock jumping spiders
   the constellations that trapdoor burrows create in the ground
looping circles of song
   stories told to possums looking down from the trees
         to the curlews walking overhead
   and to the ancestors listening from their burial sleep

               Perhaps the only way to read a poem to a spider
               is to apply their limb brain
               spread thinking to the femur
                     cogitate with the tibia
               inscribe your odes on your bones
               wait for earthly death
               and take your poems to the ground

               Long after the world above forgets you
         your larynxless singing limbs
            will lullaby each new arachnid generation
         listening through their feet
         with their healthy fear
      of poems on the wing

Cass Lynch is a writer and researcher living on Whadjuk Noongar Country. She has recently completed a Creative Writing PhD that explores deep memory features of the Noongar oral storytelling tradition; in particular stories that reference the last ice age and the rise in sea level that followed it. She is a descendant of the Noongar people and a student of the Noongar language. She is a member of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories group who focus on the revitalisation of culture and language connected to south coast Noongar people. She is the co-founder of Woylie Fest, an all-Aboriginal culture-sharing and literature festival, and through the associated Woylie Project she facilitates bringing Noongar stories into print. Her Noongar language haikus, published in Westerly 64.1, won the 2019 Patricia Hackett Prize. Her audio storytelling works have been featured at Perth Festival, Arts House Melbourne, Cool Change Contemporary, and PICA.