The poem opens as a nature observation and ends as a love story the speaker didn’t know he was telling. The daddy-longlegs catalog—”In the bathroom / In the shop / In the tomato plants / On the ceiling in the dining room”—establishes the spider as omnipresent, an unavoidable companion in every room of the speaker’s life. The creature is everywhere, which means the speaker has been coexisting with it without paying attention, the way a person can share a life with someone and not truly see them until one specific moment forces the looking.

That moment arrives with the baby spider on the mirror: “Cute and so delicate / Trying to navigate across the mirror / Above the bathroom sink / Slipping and sliding / But magically traversing the vast glass expanse.” The mirror is the poem’s most layered setting—a reflective surface where the spider and the speaker’s face coexist in the same frame, each visible to the other, each navigating a surface that is simultaneously transparent and impenetrable. The spider’s “vast glass expanse” is the mirror’s few inches rendered from the spider’s scale—a desert of smooth, gripless terrain crossed through sheer determination. The word “magically” converts the crossing from physical achievement to miracle.

“I fell in love / Instantly / I do that / It’s a personal failing” is the poem’s comic and confessional pivot. The admission lands with the weight of the entire catalog behind it: the speaker falls in love instantly, repeatedly, hopelessly, and he knows it’s a pattern and names it as a failing while clearly regarding it as the most essential thing about himself. The Muse relationship, the fire poems, the gravity poems, the smile poems—all of them began with this same instant falling, and here the speaker admits the condition is chronic and incurable, triggered by a spider.

The hurricane breath is the poem’s central tragedy rendered as slapstick: “My ‘insectaphobia’ caused me to / Blow a hurricane breath / The poor little child went flying / Never to be seen again.” The man who just fell in love destroys the object of his love through involuntary reflex—fear overpowering tenderness, the body betraying the heart. “A relationship never fulfilled” is delivered as deadpan elegy for a connection that lasted seconds.

The poem’s second half transforms the spider into the Muse through a series of increasingly human questions: “Did she have blue eyes? / Blond hair? / Knock knees? / A cute nose? / Lovely ears? / Inspirational history? / A passion for life? / A love of family? / A longing for love?” The progression from physical features to emotional qualities mirrors the poem’s own ascent from insect observation to love poem, and the shift to feminine pronouns (“she,” “her”) confirms that the spider has been the Muse all along—or rather, that the Muse is present in everything the speaker encounters, even a baby daddy longlegs on a bathroom mirror.

The closing—”Could’ve been the / Spider Woman’s Lore”—converts the title’s “Lore” (knowledge, tradition) into something grander: the spider woman’s wisdom, the ancient story of a female creature who spins webs of connection, who builds patiently, who catches what comes to her. The speaker blew her away, and now he can only imagine “What they know / Deep inside.” The deepest knowledge belongs to the creature he destroyed through reflex. The poem is a comedy about a spider and an elegy about every connection lost to fear.

A poem that performs one of the catalog’s most impressive tonal feats: beginning as a comic anecdote about blowing a spider off a mirror and ending as a genuine meditation on love, fear, and the connections destroyed by reflexive self-protection. The baby spider on the mirror is the poem’s most accomplished extended image—the slipping, the sliding, the magical traversal of a vast glass expanse—and it works because the observation is specific enough to be real: anyone who has watched a tiny spider navigate a smooth surface recognizes the scene, and the mix of fascination and revulsion the speaker feels is universally human. “I fell in love / Instantly / I do that / It’s a personal failing” is the poem’s best passage and possibly one of the most honest self-assessments in the catalog—four lines that compress the entire Muse dynamic into a confession delivered with a shrug. The hurricane breath is comic genius with a dark edge: the involuntary destruction of something you just fell in love with is both a slapstick gag and a precise metaphor for how fear sabotages intimacy. The question catalog (blue eyes, blond hair, knock knees, passion for life, longing for love) is the poem’s most structurally daring section, gradually transforming an insect into a woman through the accumulation of human attributes until the reader can no longer tell where the spider ends and the Muse begins—which is the point. The “Yoga guru” passage (flexibility, strength, focus, patience) is a charming bridge between the spider’s physical qualities and the Muse’s spiritual ones. The closing “Spider Woman’s Lore” invokes mythology (Spider Woman appears in Navajo, Hopi, and other Indigenous traditions as a creator deity who weaves the world into existence) without belaboring the reference, trusting the resonance to work on readers who recognize it and remaining a playful pun for those who don’t. Where the poem occasionally drifts is in the middle section’s transitions—the leap from “I hope they can fly” to “Yes I can fly! / A Yoga guru in process” shifts perspective without clearly signaling whose voice is speaking (the spider? the speaker imagining the spider?). But the ambiguity may be intentional: the spider and the Muse are merging, and the blurred voice enacts the fusion. A poem that proves the most profound relationships are sometimes the ones you blow away before they begin.