Cicadas
I am standing at my open office window,
tucking bullets into the beds
of our .38 revolver.
The dusky-warm wind whips
the leaves of trees beyond our lawn
—applauded by the constant hum
of a hundred thousand unseen cicadas.
Are these the sirens sent to drive me mad?
Did a hum of summer insects
in an otherwise quiet Idaho field
send Hemingway downstairs one dawn
to fetch his father’s shotgun,
to taste its barrel’s sweet-sulfur rim?
Was it the crows among the corn,
their constant cawing, that caused Van Gogh
to drop his brush and load his gun,
to send a stripe of red across his canvas?
And what of that other painter,
Der Führer in his Berlin bunker,
lifting a Lugar to his left ear
hoping to hush the allies’ advance?
Are these the evils from Pandora’s box?
No—it’s not the constant summer hum,
but the word “cicada” that stops me in my tracks.
And so I return to the chair at my desk,
lay down the revolver by a cup of steaming tea,
then pick up a pencil and scratch out a sound.
Southampton Review, 2009
