A spider settles on a camera and the poem lets it take over. Dave Bonta's five lines describe a small domestic discovery: a tiny spider has spun a web across the lens, and the speaker's response is neither to sweep it away nor to complain. Instead he checks the memory stick "for pictures of flies." The central idea is a quiet, funny parallel. The camera and the web are both devices for catching things, so the speaker half-seriously wonders whether the spider has gone into business with the machine, or in competition with it.
The poem belongs to the tanka tradition, a Japanese form of five lines, and the title tells us it is one of three. Taken alone, it works as a complete miniature. English tanka rarely keep the classic 5-7-5-7-7 pattern, and this one doesn't. Its lines run at about five or six syllables each, which gives a flat, conversational rhythm closer to speech than to verse. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. What shapes the poem is its grammar. The first sentence takes three lines to set the scene, and the second takes two to react to it. Tanka often turn between their upper and lower parts, and here the turn falls at the full stop after "camera." We move from looking at the spider to looking at what the spider might have done.
The wording is plain, and each word does a job. "Tiny" sets the scale at once, so that the spider is almost lost beside the equipment it has colonised. "Spun" suggests patient craft, a slow natural process. Against it, the speaker's verb "check" is brisk and almost clerical, the language of someone going through a routine. That contrast between slow handiwork and fast technology carries through to "memory stick," a very modern, slightly clunky phrase. "Memory" is also a quiet pun. The stick stores images, and a web, in its way, stores whatever it catches.
The line breaks are worth watching. "Has spun its web across" ends on "across," so the web hangs in mid-air for a beat before "the lens of my camera" arrives to complete it. The reader briefly feels the strand stretching over a gap. The lens is also the camera's eye, so the web is a kind of film over it, and the spider has blocked the very thing that lets the speaker see. The sounds in line four are sharp and clipped ("check," "memory stick"), with that hard k repeated like tapping through a menu. The last line then relaxes into "pictures of flies," ending on the long, lingering vowel of "flies." The word is the punchline and the prey in one, and since it is plural, the speaker is picturing a good catch.
The humour depends on a logic the poem never spells out. Judging by the final line, the speaker imagines that flies, drawn toward the lens, might have blundered into the web, or at least passed in front of the camera while the web hung there. So he treats the memory stick as a second trap and himself as the one who comes to see what has been caught. He becomes oddly spider-like, checking his lines for a catch. He doesn't tell us whether he is amused or irritated, and that restraint is part of the charm. The reader supplies the dry smile.
The poem is significant for what it manages in so little space. It takes a very ordinary moment, a bit of mess on a lens that most people would wipe off without a thought, and uses it to compare two kinds of capture. The spider catches flies with silk. The photographer catches moments with light. Both are patient and both wait for something to arrive. The poem also gently lowers the human observer. The spider shows no interest in the camera as a camera. It has simply found a good spot for a web, and the speaker, who thought he was the one doing the watching, ends up watching what the spider has caught for him. Setting a modern gadget beside an ancient craft is a good example of how a few plain lines can make a small thing worth looking at twice.