The poem catches a person at the moment before a bad decision and lets a small accident get in the way. The speaker is about to snort a line of powder, but a spider drifts down in front of his face and he stops "with my head halfway to the rails." The poem never says whether he goes on. Its attention shifts to the spider, and by the end it is following her to the floor instead of finishing his act.
The title does most of the structural work. "Lines" means the white lines on the mirror-tray, and the speaker's slangy "freight train" and "rails" suggest railway lines too. It also means the spider's silk, and the lines of the poem itself, and finally the printed lines of the newspapers where she lands. Even "connection," when the spider "severs her connection," might carry a second, slangier meaning, though that is an inference. The word keeps splitting into new meanings, and the poem asks which kind of line deserves a person's attention: the one that offers a rush, or the one a creature spins out of her own body.
The imagery sets scale against scale. The opening line is heavy and almost comic, with a whole freight train going up a nostril, and the line itself is long and clumsy. Then the poem slows into delicate observation. The spider is "swimming" through air, and the speaker sees her like "Rapunzel descending a single strand of her own hair." The fairy-tale comparison reverses the story, since Rapunzel's hair was something others climbed up. Here the hair is the spider's own, and she controls it. The speaker's eye is also exact. Her "hindmost pair of legs pays out the line, / the next two legs stick straight out for balance / & the two pairs of forelegs move in circles." Those legs add up to eight, so the count is accurate. The vocabulary of "pays out," "wake" and "anchor point" is nautical, which turns the spider into a small sailor and gives the scene its own quiet logic.
The form is one unbroken sixteen-line stanza of free verse with no rhyme. The rhythm is that of someone talking, wry and half-amused, and the ampersands add to this casual feel. Because the poem has no pattern to fall back on, the syntax carries it. Sentences spill over line breaks, just as the spider's thread pays out, and the pace changes with the action. It speeds up in "She reverses course like a yo-yo," a comic image that brings in the toy's up-and-down motion, and it slows when she falls. Sound helps in the last lines: "severs," "Sorry, sister" and "silk" all hiss together.
The most interesting moment is the speaker's tone. "Not here, I say" is the voice of someone politely redirecting a houseguest. He nudges her away from the powder, though we can read this as protecting the tray as much as protecting her. When "I push the thread a little farther & she severs / her connection," responsibility is slippery. Did she cut herself loose, or did he make her? His mumbled "Sorry, sister" admits a small guilt and a surprising kinship, as if the two of them were fellow creatures trapped in the same dim room. The word "sister" is tender and slightly absurd at once.
The ending is the poem's best joke. She lands "without incident among the headlines," on "a chaos of newspapers." A newspaper is a place where "incident" means disaster, so the spider's safe landing is a quiet piece of good news in a pile of bad. The mess on the floor also hints at the disorder of the speaker's life without lecturing about it. The poem never moralizes, and it doesn't give the speaker a redemption scene.
What makes the poem worth reading is that restraint. It treats attention as a lifeline, a thin thread that can pull a person back for a moment, and it does this through a spider, an everyday visitor that is easy to ignore. The pun on "lines" ties drug, journey, web and verse together, and the closing image lets the small creature touch down more gracefully than the human watching her.