When I was ten, I was walking in the woods
and came upon a spiderweb the size of a door
and at the center of the tangling sheet of spirals,
this funneled orbs of silk, was a spider, a Goliath
birdeater-slash-huntsman hybrid with its thick
tarantula spiked legs.  I reached out for it, this
strange knowledge that I would be safe, even as
its eight eyes rested into my thumb.  I turned
the spider, and the door opened to reveal a world
on the other side made solely of crepe and eri
silk and mulberry and chiffon and Muga silk,
a world slick, shiny, entire houses bending
with wind.  I walked in and got entangled
in an elm tree, brushing it away from my face.
I kept bouncing, on the softest path I’d ever
walked on until I got to my own home, a home
now for caterpillars, how they lounged on my
old front porch that was now a new front porch,
so tiny and satiny.  I walked up to the front door,
its complication of webs, jumbled threads, and
gently pushed it open, slipping on the smooth
floor so that I fell, landed, harsh, on hardwood,
looking up to see my mother, hovering, telling
me that lunch was ready.  The door blew shut
before I could run back, see if I could find that
world again, but it would only come once, similar,
I suppose, to how I traveled to China fifteen years
later, returned to the U.S., and found myself
never having the time or money to go back, how
I started to wonder if China was real or dream,
or not even a dream, a place that had never
existed for anyone, even the people living there,
now, and when I look into the deep corners of
my closet and see barely visible spiders, I ask
them if I’ll ever be able to return and they are
so silent that I can hear the building moving,
how wind whispers secrets all of the time.