On the third floor,
rows of boxes lean against
one wall. I no longer know
what’s in them: cables,
books, picture frames?
It doesn’t seem to matter.
*
But today I unwrapped
presents we were given years
ago: one glass kettle with
a blue marble on its lid, a pair
of hand-painted candlesticks;
one hand-crocheted tablecloth
trellised in tiny daisies.
*
We went for a walk
as the sun scalded
the hulls of ships
vermillion, one last
time before giving
in to the dark.
*
Has anyone ever
given you an Indian
rope burn? Voices
of children darting
through jets of water
at the fountain.
*
Quaint towns along
the coast, houses with
wraparound porches.
Perhaps a clearer
view of summer
skies from there.
After posting a new photo on my poor, neglected photohaiku blog, I found for some reason the subject-matter—the depredations of locust leafminers—prompting a whole series of somewhat nerdy haiku, which I posted in the comments there. Let me repost them here. (If you’re familiar with this phenomenon, feel free to add your own haiku below.) I tried to take some additional photos of our brown black locusts this afternoon, but none of the pictures turned out.
locust leafminers
now the leaves get more of the sky
than just sunlight
*
the locusts look as if
they’ve been eaten by locusts:
leafminers
*
one million beetles
hiding under
one million leaves
*
locust leaves
skeletonized by beetles
hiss in the wind
*
already brown
before the storm toppled it
black locust limb
*
a leafminer beetle
lands on my thinning scalp
black locust grove
This entry is part 3 of 34 in the series Small World
O screw
with your fine thread
your bugle head
your shank
your sharp tip—
you with your disinclination to slip
have taught me all
I need to recall
about politics:
go left & get loose
go right & tighten
into place
like dutiful screws
but beware the quick fix
the stripped thread
the buggered head
of those who are too
truly screwed.
Once, I wept long and hard for a prize I wanted so badly but had not won.
It’s painful to learn how skin after skin is shed, in continuous passage.
There was a game we used to play, to come back to ourselves: in the middle of fleeting
thought, someone would call Stop. We’d search within for a foothold, in passage.
The potter urges clay upon the wheel into a shape, then feeds it to the fire. Glaze
and slip applied under noon’s vacant heat: a body emerges out of the kiln, in passage.
From a hospital bed in upstate New York, my friend calls tonight to say she’s been moved
to rehab. After a stroke, her left side is numb; the simplest movement is arduous passage.
I used to take everything for granted, she says. Today it took me fifteen minutes to slide
a button into its hole. The man who made my leg brace lost one arm as a soldier, in passage.
Am I selfish when I confess that sometimes I feel the ones I love most are the ones
that might do me in? My heart tumbles its load like a laundry machine: damp passage.
Crickets sing, metallic in the evenings. In the distance, lightning answers. We turn
the TV on to watch the late night news: chance of hail, thunderstorms in passage.
It’s hard to keep the focus on the ridgeline before us, isn’t it? We are so given to keep looking beyond. And we tend to look beyond not so much with our eyes, as with our feelings, whatever those may be, from fear to hope to greed. We set out to map that beyond with our complicated compasses: some of us look for adventures, while others for more territory to claim for our sprawling desires. We go from surveyors of experiences to purveyors of schemes in a heartbeat.
A male hummingbird
circles the metal pink
flamingo in my garden,
circles & touches it
with its all-purpose bill.
Amazed? Perplexed?
Combatative? Appalled?
The sun sinks behind
the trees & the first
katydids start calling
as the hummer zips
in for a landing on
the single rusty leg,
perching sideways
just below the tail,
& taps the pink wing
with its diviner’s
wand of a bill.
Never challenge an onion to a game of strip poker. ~ D. Bonta
Ashes can substitute for black pepper in a pinch.
Best used fresh, like everything else; and only sparingly.
Carbon: it all breaks down into carbon anyway—
don’t worry, no need to bring out the syrup of ipecac,
expectorate, induce. What’s the most odious thing you’ve had to eat? Foie gras, shudders my friend the wealthy doctor. Ducks fed
grain by gavage— two to four times a day, the animals
held, their throats expanded under a funnel fitted to a tube.
It’s this wild dilation and overfeeding that renders
king-sized livers: two lobes of mousse-like, buttery consistency.
Leafed out like that upon a plate, punctuated with a dollop of
mustard cream or raspberry confit: could you bear to eat with
nary a twinge of conscience or remorse? It may be that a stew
of carrots, lentils, and potatoes is neither innocent: some hand
pulled tubers out of the soil, peeled or pared and sliced them into
quadrants on the chopping board. You know how dominoes cascade,
rush river-like? Caveat: they fall at the merest touch. Why sing to pickled things in a minor key? For
the ice sheet in Greenland that has almost all melted, for sea
urchins that, even if they might not be currently endangered, could
very soon wind up on that list: admire their powerful scraping jaws
which I found out are called “Aristotle’s lanterns.” None will be
exempt from ruin and devastation— so quit behaving like
you’ll have a golden ticket out. Heed the poet who points out
zen in the onion’s innermost chamber: stripped clean, empty.
Just as the lightness of sleep overtakes me, I hear the phrase, “Death has its own constituency.” I wake to read of the tar sands pipeline potentially delayed by a critically endangered species of carrion beetle, the American burying beetle(Nicrophorus americanus).
With its shiny, black and fiery body and orange-tipped antennae, the American burying beetle is a vibrant beauty of the bug world. The insect’s occupation, though, is a little less glamorous. After sniffing out a freshly dead animal from up to two miles away, the beetle joins a mate in burying the carcass, stripping it of fur or feathers, rolling it into a ball, and covering it in oral and anal fluids to preserve it as a shelter and food source for the pair’s litter of lucky larvae.
A newspaper article reporting on the possible delay prompts the predictable reactions from readers: “Step on them.” “A couple of cans of RAID and the problem is OVER.” “Drill baby drill!” One ignoramus even goes on a rant:
who cares about a beetle really, this is as bad as not growing produce in Calif. because of a little 2 inch fish that died in the aqua duck system..do you think either one is more important then people lives and feeding their young children..NO NO NO the answer will always be NO, even God made insects and animals to eventually die out for what ever reason, so get a grip on it folks this is trash talk to step on you as a person and your rights….
No matter many times I hear this kind of ignorant callousness disguised as piety and concern for human beings, I still turn cold with rage, and before I know it I, too, am harboring violent fantasies…
How ironic that our penchant for unearthing the byproducts of ancient deaths, to the detriment of the planet, endangers a beetle whose role in the ecosystem is to help recycle the dead to the benefit of us all. As the CBD puts it:
The American burying beetle is one of nature’s most efficient recyclers, feeding and sheltering its own brood while simultaneously returning nutrients to the earth to nourish vegetation and keeping ant and fly populations in check.
It seems unusual for a habitat generalist to suffer such precipitous declines in population across its range, but, says the Encylclopedia of Life entry:
[E]vidence points increasingly to a cascade of changes in vertebrate communities resulting from habitat fragmentation and other human-caused disturbances. Loss of the largest mammal predators has resulted in increases of smaller mammal predator-scavengers that are more likely to compete with [the American burying beetle] for carcasses of still smaller mammals or birds.
In other words, our extirpation of top predators across North America, including wolves and cougars, may ultimately be to blame. The beetles themselves have no known predators, and appear to have a symbiotic relationship with a species of mite that helps keep them clean of microbes and fly eggs in return for access to carcasses. Even more remarkable is their habit of caring for their young:
American burying beetles provide care for their young from the time of birth until adolescence. This type of behavior is typically not observed among invertebrates outside of social bees, wasps, and termites.
Prior to birth, both parents regurgitate partially digested food in the nesting chamber, which accumulates as food for the larvae. They continue to do so until larvae are able to feed directly from the carcass. Parents also regularly maintain the carcass by removing fungi and covering the carrion ball with antibacterial secretions.
Let’s see—there’s a phrase for that sort of thing in American political discourse, isn’t there? Oh, yes: family values.
It’s sad how many people who describe themselves as conservative have, in service to corporate agendas, forsaken the most conservative principle of all: First, do no harm. “Because the American burying beetle has a highly vulnerable status in the wild, the two known natural populations (Block Island, Rhode Island and eastern Oklahoma) should be protected and maintained,” says the Encylopedia of Life. In recycling the dead, the American burying beetle helps preserve and extend the cycle of life. In advocating for its elimination, conservatives show themselves to be staunch supporters of what Pope John Paul II labeled the culture of death.
