Poem-A-Day: Sherod Santos, A Feeling of AND, a Feeling of OR

	August 9, 2012 Today's poem is copyright © 2012 by Sherod Santos. Used with permission of the author. More from this author Related Poems A Woman Named Thucydides by Sherod Santos Adjectives of Order by Alexandra Teague House Spiders by Judith Vollmer Once More, with Feeling by Luis Cernuda You can unsubscribe from our Poem-A-Day emails at at anytime—either completely, or until next April. Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane Suite 901 New York, NY 10038 212-274-0343 academy@poets.org		A Feeling of AND, a Feeling of OR by Sherod Santos The window in mid-summer raised, and where the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair where a yellow spiny-backed spider waits, its six thorn spurs protruding rose-like from its abdomen, its casing imprinted with a wax seal ring. Attached to the foundation lines, clusters of white cottony tufts, lures, I suppose, for insects, and suspended from a single thread, a much smaller egg-shaped spider (the male?) swaying imperceptibly in the air: an image from childhood that reminds me of "childhood," a word that so often crosses my mind that it long ago ceased to mean anything other than a period of time when things occurred not to me so much as him, and all of them linked only by AND. As in the span of a single moment, the afternoon after the all-clear when the sun rose on a bloated, fly-stung pygmy goat in a gravel slough he crossed to wave to a woman with a Red Cross band on her arm. AND: the red pinball bumper cap ("5000 when lit") in a tented arcade on Brighton Pier when he was twelve. Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend