Aesop says be like the ant,
eschew grasshopper ways:
the ant puts by and plans ahead,
grasshoppers waste their days.
The ants in frantic harvest
prepare for winter’s grey.
The grasshopper, all moony,
ponders the green of today;
in foolery like writing
does he his muse pursue;
he yearns to be a poet
and use words like “eschew.”
Many more thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
I have no idea how he got the grasshopper to pose like this.
This unpleasant-looking fellow
appears to think that he
has right of way and title
to private property.
I am sure I heard harrumph!
as I dared to hover near;
suspiciously he eyed me
with arrogant bug leer.
“My mentor was a Klingon”
(how absurdly braggadocious)
“who considered me outstanding,
in point of fact, precocious.”
“Cloaking device engaged!”
he proclaimed as he lifted and veered
to a multi-green leafy lilac
and forthwith disappeared.
What count today?
How many swings and swerves?
Is her language getting colorful?
Are we getting on her nerves?
Did you see my body slam?
Mid-forehead, perfect aim!
Well, I got her on her ear —
I love this summer game!
What sport her dodge and dip,
her crazed and darting eyes,
her twitch at our chorale
of razors in the skies.
I’ll race you to her head!
Come on! I double-dare!
The winner is the one
who gets tangled in her hair!
Victor Herbert wrote songs for my parents’ generation, so I was raised with some of them. One, I think, he wrote especially for writers: “Ah, sweet mystery of life!”
Writers know the mystery of life is words. Mysteriously they come. Mysteriously they go. Who can understand?
I’ve been without words for a few weeks now. Total blank. Tabula rasa. Nada. Zip. I’ve started a few blog posts that were the undead of writing.
Meanwhile we’ve gone overnight from Too-Cold-To-Garden to Yikes-It’s-Suddenly-Summer-and-Get-Those-Plants-In-NOW! It’s been wonderful to take my dejected writer self to the dirt.
It used to be that digging in my dirt was about worms. Now it’s about cicadas. More, there’s a little bush in front festooned with their overcoats. Apparently a bunch of cicadas got together and decided to shed simultaneously, leaving their outsides dangling on my little shrub like so many crispy-looking ornaments. Ick.
That ghostly emptiness speaks to me. The writer is only an exoskeleton when she doesn’t have words, and the wind whistles through her as she dangles from some metaphorical shrub.
I know that my sadistic muse is nearby, smirking.
We’ve climbed up Darwin’s ladder
of Natural Selection,
the bug and I together,
toward evolutionary perfection,
but I ponder our relative states:
who has the higher trajection,
the one with legs and wings,
or the one stuck in this election?
In stillness
the leaves,
in silence
the shadows,
maybe a bug,
burrowing,
crackles,
sighs,
tummy-scratches,
sleeps.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg
and to Fort Harrison State Park, Indianapolis.
A driven, fevered
bee be he,
zigging, zagging
drunkenly;
mead of autumn,
sweet and heady,
makes his skinny legs
unsteady,
wobbily resolved
in year’s decline
to buzz each flower
an Auld Lang Syne.
If I breathe,
will I hurt the air,
will I break the moon,
shatter, tear
this moment
frail, silvern,
when crickets whisper
Chopin nocturne?
In bright foreshadow
does autumn sun
frost the amethyst;
then does the butterfly know
to kiss it goodbye.
With thanks to photographer Mary Jo Bassett.
It seems to me
there’s an obvious plot
to get my goat
(which is got a lot).
How else explain
these mortal remains,
matted and framed,
among the day’s banes?
A villainous move,
a deliberate ploy,
to irritate, vex,
to taunt and annoy.
There was nothing to do
but take all apart
and grouse at the bug
who thought he was art.
