I spied her entwine an out-spiraling net,
each jittery stride trailing radial spans
before coming to rest
astride her last strands.
 
Still-standing and idling
then inching and sidling
till centered she sits, wind-wafted and wheeling,
unhearing, unseeing, enmeshed in pure feeling.
 
From above, a tableau of flutter and flop;
from within, she awaits the faintest pin drop.
A gnat mid-air, full stop, enstranded;
arachnid sensed where it had landed.
 
She swivels right
to eight o’clock.
One silken vibe
betrayed the spot.  

*****

Steve Clayman writes: “The poem’s content was inspired by a remarkable book on the sensory systems of animal species (An Immense World, by science journalist Ed Yong).   Reading the book gave me vertigo, the good kind that arises from being drawn into the “alien” perceptual worlds that other species inhabit.  In a chapter on tactile senses, Yong writes that many web-spinning spiders are nearly blind and deaf, but are extraordinarily sensitive to vibrations.  Thus the web is far more than a trap for prey:

It’s also a surveillance system, which extends the range of the spider’s senses well beyond the reach of its body….  It is as much a part of the creature’s sensory system as the [sensors] on its body. Most orb-weavers sit in the middle of their webs and rest their legs on the radial spokes that funnel vibrations toward them.  From this position, they can distinguish the vibrations generated by rustling wind or falling leaves from those created by struggling prey.  They can probably work out where those struggles are coming from by comparing the strength of the vibrations hitting each of their legs….  If the prey stops moving, they can find it by deliberately plucking the silk and “listening” to the return vibrational echoes. 

“As for the poem’s form, I came up with the first line and the rest emerged organically, in the course of dealing with the possibilities of that starting point.  So the overall form was not planned, although after the first line I was determined to avoid using the word spider or web throughout the poem.”

*****

‘Enmeshed in Pure Feeling’ was first published in Lighten Up Online, edited by Jerome Betts.

Steven Clayman is professor of sociology at UCLA. He likes to think that his light verse is at least loosely related to his research specialization in conversation analysis and the study of language use in everyday life.  His scholarly work appears in linguistics, communication, and sociology journals, and in the books (co-authored with John Heritage) Talk in Action (Wiley-Blackwell) and The News Interview (Cambridge University Press).  His poems have appeared in Lighten Up Online, Philosophy Now, Better Than Starbucks, Light: A Journal of Light Verse, and Asses of Parnassus.
 

“Spider and Web” by kendoman26 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.