Houdini

Molting his straitjacket,
the magician dangled fourteen stories up.
If I didn’t know that it was a trick,
I would have imagined him a fly—
caught on a misleading silky thread
and wriggling beneath the salt shaker of a spider.

The spider would be hiding,
just beyond the pebbly rooftop
and its pipe cleaner leg would be creeping—
were that not a crane’s arm reaching down,
pulling not a fly up,
but a magician.