Weldon Kees

by Scott Ciencin

My grandmother named the spiders that lived
in her cottage they were as big as
clocks and she talked to them while she washed
dishes; they
dangled
over her sink
and she told them they were welcome
because they were doing a wonderful job
at catching flies.

I called her "Nana." She called
her spiders
Thomas and Ojibwah, and other names, too
Robinson and Little Boy and
Greta Van Buren. In

the attic room, where I slept,
the spiders were nameless. They stole into
my bed in the deep hours
and bit, and went
away.

I secretly thought my Nana was crazy
for naming spiders.

Weldon Kees
jumped from a bridge
into anonymity, except among people who cared,
people who didn't want to follow him into
a languid
eternity, who needed his
poetry, only. Such

a tidy little man; shirtsleeves rolled
into square folds, thinning black hair angular
with control, eyes as dark as the anarchic
moments
before sleep if he named spiders, he
must have named them after
nightmares. I think he enjoyed

the dinners
of the civilized, nothing that might
drip and stain,
and he must have always
kept his napkin
on his lap, always kept his
elbows
off the table, always complimented

the eager chef (because tidy men who eat
hungrily gladden the hearts
of chefs), and then, finished, he must have
pushed his chair gently,
almost without sound,
away from the table, and stood, and swiped
delicately at his pants, and touched

his shirt buttons, and quickly fingered his neat
moustache,
and then he must have
gone off
to contemplate
the naming of spiders, and the awful
chaos
and coercion
of words. I want to believe there's a Kees

ghost loose on that Kees bridge
or in the water beneath, or somewhere
downstream--slipping, slipping, slipping in his
wingtips
on the wet stones,

in the mud, in the tall grass, trying
for a toehold on the earth,
again, believing himself able to cope,
at last, with the untidiness
that breathing brings.

Scott Ciencin hails from Baltimore, Maryland, where he lives with his wife of forty-three years, Katherine, twelve cats, a ferret, and a small, untamed mouse. This is Mr. Ciencin's second published poem.