Scott Ruescher’s new collection of poems, Above the Fold, will be out from Finishing Line Press in March 2025. In his retirement, he has been writing promotional materials for The Neighborhood Developers in Chelsea and helping to teach ESOL and citizenship classes at The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden.

La Teleraña                                 

Underneath the epiphytic plants, nourished just by dust, that sprout
In the limbs and branches of sun-stretched trees, underneath
Bromeliads and orchids, for instance, in the jungle along the bank
Of the Cuyabeno River, our indigenous Amazonian Siona guide, Andréa,
Recited a litany of houseplants we grow indoors back home,
Philodendrons, passion flowers, rubber trees, and heliconia,
As she led us along a foot path, across the splayed roots of kapok trees,
Over a fallen log (with scratch marks, she said, from a jaguar’s claws),
And through shady understory, past umbrella-like mushrooms,
Feather-like maiden ferns, and rope-like liana vines that had climbed
Into the heights of those kapoks from their roots in the ground.

Then we came to the spider web, some eight feet across, la teleraña,
With which some enterprising arachnid, a colorful cupiennius
Or a slender neotame, that lives on mosquitoes, butterflies, and gnats,
Had connected two of those vines, whereupon Andréa advised us
To step back and admire from a distance how the spider with a precise
Geometrical grace worthy of a math teacher or a civil engineer
Had filled that large space; how she’d managed to spin the cables,
Both the radials extending from the hub and the spirals connecting them,
Without losing the symmetry of the web, even as it sagged with a dew
That sparkled at one or another place along a segment of silk thread
For each of us at once when we squinted into the morning sun.

— Scott Ruescher

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