Coding is of the language of computer programming, the stuff that runs it all, but which is rarely seen, integral but hidden, and indecipherable for most people. Graham's code though, unlike programming source code, is above--"For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese // as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading." The notion that something else controls what is visible, what is presented, that something is always connected to something else, as occurs in computer language, is for Graham applicable to the natural world. But she asserts that "things will not remain connected, / will not heal," hinting that "things" are not in their best form. The following lines, "and the world thickens with texture instead of history, / texture instead of place" indicate that the piling up of texture is not desirable, that history and place would be better. Without history, something is always new, always at its beginning, not established, not having any place. It is a state of detachment from anything, a lack of being connected.

The poem continues with "Yet the small fear of the spiders / binds and binds," telling the reader that it is not the spiders, who naturally build webs, nets of links and connections, that bind, but their fear, something intangible and often dissipating. This binding is thus unsure "as if, at any time, things could fall further apart / and nothing could help them / recover their meaning." The "their" presumably refers to the things that are being bound, the things that are given a place, a history by these links, and when the links fall apart, the bound objects lose their meaning because if they are not connected to anything, not a part of anything, then they have no relevance, no point in being (there).

For Graham, the coding world of the geese and the spiders is a different world from hers, the one in which she hangs out the wash, and yet these two worlds are layered on one another, and both are partially transparent to the effect that only one world can be seen, probably a mixture of the two. But Graham fears one world could exclude the other and she asks, "And if these spiders had their way, // chainlink over the visible world, / would we be in or out?" Would the people be contained in the world, under the spiders chainlink formation, or excluded from it, outside of it, but always somehow connected to it, because it is only the visible world, and what is visible is the conflation of the two worlds, not the actual different and separate worlds. In this meditation on spiders, the poem gives voice to webs and their inherent oscillation between connections and containment.