Fashionista Street: Arachnophilia 1

[Photo by Bill Cunningham/NYT]

Bill Cunningham’s latest On The Street photo essay returns to Paris. “Many members of the fashion world at the recent Paris shows,” he says, “seemed to pay homage to the look of a Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture in the Tuileries Garden. The spindly silhouette, it appears, has legs.”

Spiders seem to be making a fierce comeback at the edge of winter. NPR interviewed anarachnologist and taxonomist who spends his days drawing spiders’ nether parts in order to classify and name new species before they become extinct. The caption for one of his drawings is a found poem for arachnophiles: “Female Orsonwelles spiders of different species exhibit different copulatory organs.” [I’m not making this up; see the drawing for yourself.] “On the left, the Orsonwelles malus from Kauai has a much larger organ — called the epigynum — on its abdomen than the Orsonwelles graphicus from Hawaii on the right.”

How could this not remind me of a poem? What doesn’t these days? This one was written in 1977.

Uncle Dow’s Reply

A spider has spun its web
across my typewriter.
I’ve been walking in the woods
so Long, thinking and talking
alone.

Go ahead,
catch my words if you can.
Wrap them with silk thread
shot from your spinneret.
Save them for winter
or suck them dry now.