A Feeling of AND, a Feeling of OR

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.