Spiderwebs in Creve Coeur

surprised me with the late sunlight touching
the waists of trees.

Liquid glass spun thin, suspended,
their facets were flashing as I walked.

The sky was losing its yellow,
and somehow the little architectures emerged

below, alongside, above
every living thing we could see.

They seemed to us no bigger than coins
tilted at all angles, joining limbs of ash

and pine, hanging
from moldering log to fine stem,

holding vine leaves and dry grass
in their fragile scoops,

in every direction, for yards of distance
that suddenly seemed enormous.

We stopped.
Off the path, to find a few of their makers,

I leaned in close enough to flinch
at the touch of a hair-like filament.

The spiders were black, tiny,
plain as Missouri.

It seemed impossible that they alone
stretched this handiwork

across my field of vision.
A photograph came to mind,

the Hubble's view of thousands of galaxies
in an inch of sky,

spirals of light and color, tilted against each other,
crowding the aperture

at distances beyond fathoming,
where, before then,

there had been only dark
and unknowable space.

*Sheri Allen has just completed her second year in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. Her poems have been published in *Boulevard* and *The Sagarin Review,* and her translation of a Hebrew liturgical poem will appear in the forthcoming issue of *Delos.* Prior to Florida, she lived and worked in several American cities and in three continents abroad, including St. Louis, MO, where she earned an MA in English from Washington University in 1998 and taught English at several community colleges on both sides of the Mississippi.