Because the cicadas have come
this summer. Because they have left behind
many holes, darknesses that loop
down and down like intestines
in the earth’s carnivorous
gut. Because “gut” is not only noun
but verb: eviscerate viscera.
Vice versa. We are and we are done to.
Lo, what will be versed and
reversed—composed then eaten—
is everything, is it not?
Romance, drama, the insect
multitudes.
Us, eventually. That event.
That end.
Trembling, as in many vowels
sung together. A certain otherness
of skin, as if preparing to molt.
Perceptions of words
as transformers, metamorphic.
And then surrender,
all the books read
completely forgotten, even their paper
and boards gone to memory’s compost,
a murmuration of
cellulose and bast digested.
Your breath is sucked up
into laughter not your own and
in some weird and other
body you find yourself singing—
flying
In the hammer cohabit
cousins gravity and intention.
They work together
to muscle asunder the softer world:
flesh, wings,
all frail antennae.
Iron or steel,
or bronze
or stone. We go backwards
in such tools,
yet forget beginnings.
Our hands. Our wrists,
Our minds
make action, consequence.
Linnaean litanies.
The labyrinth of Crete.
Assyrian walls.
We will, we gouge and smash
and group and gather and pile up our ways
toward the knowledge
that itself may break us as we enter,
alien, headlong, its wild careen.
I feel my hands grow hard and wider,
mole-cricket-like, feel salt
in my ears, chitin in my elbows.
Memories without language
sleepwalk my dreams
and I am worm, lizard,
the origin of eyes.
Such a lived livid life
is your own as much as mine,
ours again of richness
and perception. Magnetic fields
mean something to our flesh now,
as does the bees’ infrared.
I am no longer what I was.
I enact the mute history
of mute things. What I was
graduates as the nymph graduates,
achieving bright wings and red eyes.
Then suddenly
I escape the danger
of self
into the convocation of species,
this glad clamor,
this rest in all the rest.
Steubenville, Ohio native Richard Hague’s work has appeared in Poetry, Smartish Pace, Appalachian Journal, Northern Appalachian Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Nowhere Magazine, Hiram Poetry Review, Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Ohio Magazine, Still: The Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Creative Nonfiction, among many others, and in dozens of anthologies. He is author or editor of 22 volumes of prose and poetry, most recently Continued Cases (Dos Madres Press, 2023), a collection of environmental, satirical, and political poems and the nonfiction collection Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work (Bottom Dog Press 2018) listed as “Recommended” by the US Review of Books.
Image of the Hum-bug, the Little-Dear, and the Dad-Shad (and young) from Henry L. Stephens, The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (Philadelphia: S. Robinson, 1851).
