Circling the Window Sill: An Ode

Outside my window screen the insects gather.

The familiarity of their shapes – the moth wings I’ve known as long as I’ve known

Night lights,

The bulbous browns and blacks, dull beetle brows, hovering hornet wings,

The tiny footless legs – scurry or still, flicker or beat –

Never ceases to divulge a bizarre and eerie underside:

they never stop encroaching, never tire of

Staring

And hoping, even after I have burned them or squished them,

Pulled off their wings or stuffed them under glass jars

Where I watched them slowly suffocate.

Their being – matter of collected debris, form of malformed limbs –

Ignores time, our symphonic bricolage of crumbling causes and cacophonous effects.

There is no collective memory; they cannot learn to be afraid.

They still blithely eat our wheat and raid our pantries long after we laid our first traps and poured forth our poisons. If not for nights like these,

Reproduction and hunger would seem their only realities, and

I could grasp their insignificance.

But their windowshapes are not visions of hunger, unless their hunger is metaphorical

and they hunger for the flesh of metaphorical light.

Here the human movement of light over darkness collapses into

Their black over the light. Here their familiarity does nothing to lessen their harshness,

the outright otherness of their frenzied patience.

I don’t know what they want or why they wait.

Science is not profound enough for this;

it is too impersonal a system to shift off my perturbation at the

pointless manque moth-strikes, the endless gyrations of

The unknown insect squad circling the window sill.

They do not seek salvation like humans moving

Towards the light,

Nor do they seek freezing death, like so many lemmings tumbling

To the ocean’s door.

No heroics outside the screen, no reason, no pride; no pity inside.

But still I wonder and I fear:

When they crawl into my brain, will they still belong to un-nostalgia,

To a mute and -free night, to a past with only a mythical claim upon me,

(Born of Hesiodic chaos as I am)

To viscera without intestines,

To probings without a cerebellum;

Or will there be a shadow in their darkness?