Which Yet May Be Real Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now does the spider dream of me,
As I dream of him,
The poisonous expectation set up shop in
The bends of cemented plumbing, vibrating
Around the knees of the pump house’s tinned hum;
Or, like me, is he unable to conceive the ambitions
Of higher men as they reach the summit of petroleum,
As we go down the other side like lost children
Just learning to walk, as I spill out reckless novels
For a half hour a day, as excuses for my hours
Of self-inebriated recreations,
Though surely I continue to conceive him spun in
That diminutive world, waiting for the monsoons to
Grow the flies,
Just as many legs as her, the galloping centipede,
The ambitious love with honey-split lips, though how
Can I know of her except that she busies me in
Unwanted sleep, and I keep up on her with my words,
Like spindles of love from a hypothetical thorax,
Just as the spider weeps a life on lesser fluids,
Weary of the multitudinous cannibalism of his offspring,
So I see him resting there in the dryness of his cove,
While mothers wash and wash the clothes, just as their
Children, until they are sure that these are clean, and smell
So- But if they saw him as I did, would they not call for
His extinction, only because they smell as soap and lavender,
And have not yet perceived him watching me in fitful conception
Of slumbering wounds, as I behold him steadily in kind,
Assuring one another that we are the halves of the complexity
Which yet may be real.