BY JAN HAAG
CICADA
The cicadas emerge upward, hideous, crawling,
underground
creatures, like sickness on a tree, moving
with their claws, pinching, clinging
to the bark. Ascending fence posts,
or any soft-barked, upright thing,
they wait as hump
backed
shadows, silent so silent,
still, so still. Not
a
sound,
not
the slightest sound as the brown shell-back
splits
open, lets a new head, a second consciousness,
enlightenment emerge.
Greyish, pale, the pupa quivers.
An infinity passes as, like a fiddlehead
fern, a green delicacy
rises, a question mark from the slit in the
mustard-brown, scaled
armor. Self will? Gravity reversed? Necessity?
Gossamer, the color
of unripe apples, gathered stumps emerge, ferried
on inevitability, the legs,
doubled, crossed in prayer on its corrugated
chest. Still no sound. Only rising,
the question rising. Now the wings
extended, stretch out, open down, slowly,
stately, trembling like the
night-blooming cerius. The cicada stands hovering
upon it's first body's
corpse, freed now from a house that seems too small,
too dense, ugly,
restricted to have contained such wings, the awesome
potential for
flight. It rests and rests, not a flutter, only the unfolding;
no movement,
except a shimmer of retreat from my stroking. The wings
darken, a
pattern of tan, brown, black, like the pottery of the Anasazi,
clarifies on
its back. From green its stumps turn transparent, black
veins appear.
The wings begin to stiffen -- they become filaments,
like the dragon
fly's, with color only at the shoulder. How soon
will it fly? All night on
my straw hat, it rests unmoving. Silent.
At dawn motionless. Through
the morning unmoving. Then
I find it on the floor. Only at noon I
think, "It needs a leaf,
to stand on, to nibble, to gather strength for its
flight."
By its wings I place it outside my screen where
it clings. I
bless it, blessed by witnessing
a transformation I can only long
for.
No second body is vouchsafed me.
When I've done my
practice
the cicada is gone. A hum
like electric impulses
buzzes
through
the universe,
wrapping
Gaia
with
a
mesh of
awareness
For Helen Hawley for a cicada body from
Australia. For David Hannauer for a cicada, body and soul, from the
Gila
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
George Coluzzi
I Am Innuit
McDonald Observatory
BY JAN HAAG