Territorial

The water keeps rising.
The spiders are frantic,
Hunting less and less shore.
Dead wood rinsed from the slopes
Jostles in rotting piles.
Women talk on the pier

Discussing the boathouse
Now knee deep in water
And floating detritus.
Their kayaks are inside.
They give up on boating
And reminisce instead

About summers thirty,
Forty or more years gone,
When their kids took lessons
From this pier and came out
Blue-lipped with cold, about
The boys who were bullies

And threw other kids in,
About how their father
Beat them at home, so no
Wonder, right? Talk all comes
To gossip in the end.
Looking back at the lake

As it tears at its shore
And all the broken trees,
One woman folds her arms
And shrugs. "Well it does that."
They wander back to town.
The spiders keep hunting.