Rip Van Winkles from
our remembered past, link to
an unsure future;
prime number of years
separating us from what
has been and will be.
Predictable: no
arcane algorithm, just
layman’s addition.
A city composed
of those who remember and
those who wish they did.
Imagination
of memory and ignorance
collide, fold together.
“Just how bad, again?”
“Shut-your-door-fast-or-else bad,
in Eighty-seven.”
Headlines, talking heads
succumb to a gratifying
hyperbole:
“Invasion Coming!”
“Emergency Plans Made for
Insect Emergence!”
Cicada expert
and biology professor
from Mount St. Joseph’s,
Dr. Kritsky calms
us with facts and data: his
fifteen days of fame.
Soil temperature
reaches sixty-five, soaking
rain softens the earth;
we wait, hold our breaths;
scan tree trunks for trackless dark
shadows, quivering;
crane our ears out car
windows for the first clicky
whines of the cycle.
Nothing…on nothing.
Official emergence be
damned! What a let-down!
But they finally come,
trickle out silent in the night,
silent the next day,
a trail of outgrown
husks dangling from leaf stems or
scattered ‘round tree trunks.
Here and not here, they
hide in treetops, stretching wings,
adjusting to air.
The chorus begins:
pulsating, rhythmic; surging
and receding like
waves on a night beach,
constant as a waterfall
breaking over rocks.
May-June companions,
we share world and worries with
these red-eyed drummers.
Only vaguely there
in low pressure: spluttering
among the raindrops
Insistent in sun:
announcing virility
and desperation.
A thrilling, swarming
cacophony beneath the
shaken yellow ash.
Lined up on trunk and
limb like black-gold hearses
on an L.A. freeway.
Two-headed creatures
making good on the promise
of seventeen years;
Kamikaze bugs
dive-bombing the innocent:
a hit-and-run strike;
indiscriminate
hitchhikers on shirt sleeve or
lawn mower rip cord;
clumsy fliers, bouncing
off misplaced stalks, sputter out
mid-road, rest too long.
Fallen bodies litter
road and sidewalk: organic
precipitation—
leg-up cadavers:
latest casualties from the
sky of attrition.
Sometimes it is hard to tell the living from the dead.
I pick one up, lightly pinch its wings to its abdomen;
no sound or movement, so I drop it on the ground.
Another: protests feebly, a few sporadic clicks.
Between my thumb and forefinger, I turn her
(it is a her—she clicked, after all) to face me.
Her red eyes, less red than I remembered from
the emergence, absolutely expressionless,
not a hint of pleading or even desire. Before
it’s too late, I toss her in the air.
The ol’ wings—not old at all, of course—
fail her and she lands up-turned in the grass,
the six forelegs that pulled her so faithfully
up and down tree roots for seventeen years and,
ultimately, into the light grasp ineffectually at air.
A body breaks down.
Nature has passed on its genes
and the body is free to break down: Go ahead.
Why am I so sad for this being who feels no pain,
who doesn’t know her last hours will be spent circling
a blade of grass, staring up at an uncaring sky?
Now: birds sing sweetly
an air conditioner hums—
deafening absence.
by Andrew Speno
June 2004
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