Spineless Wonders: Invertebrates as Inspiration September 8 - December 18, 2009
Poems from the Exhibition
The Lowly, Exalted is the title poem from this collection gathered for the exhibition Spineless Wonders: Invertebrates
as Inspiration, curated by the Atrium Art Gallery at the University
of Southern Maine's Lewiston-Auburn College. We thank all
the poets who contributed work.
Some of these poems are educational horseshoe crabs have
been around since the age of dinosaurs; slugs are
efficiently hermaphroditic; the extinction of the passenger pigeon caused
the loss of a louse. Sex, murder, love all included from the
worm to the cuttlefish. Enjoy these poems like escargot. Let
them linger on the lips. Let the stressed/unstressed match your
breath, the rhythm, your pulse. Consider the story of Oscar Wilde,
who took the whole morning deciding to take out a comma from
a poem and in the afternoon, put it back. The lowly comma.
Nothing passes poets unnoticed. They've been busy,
dreaming into being, The Lowly, Exalted.
male firefly
rising higher in the dusk
female dimming below
-Kelley White
Dark Silk
A steady ripple up a stalk or wall,
a brisk waddle under fur,
stripes like a festal stocking,
seedling-green, satin-black: larvae
moving. All are going
somewhere, on some mission
unintelligible. To the top
of the milkweed bloom tossing
pollen at the sky? To the roof
of the house standing in the way
like some angular boulder, seeking view
of the bay? But at the end, only dark
silk. We don't know how
they like it, or stand it: that close
space, that wall against wind
and sun, that swinging
head down like the Hanged Man.
But they go on, in. Maybe
it will come out as it should. Maybe
they will see sun again, float
scale-bright where they crawled
and chewed, taste the sweets
of stamens and salts of human
urine. Or not. They don't
know. Into dark silk they walk;
up the stalk they go.
True bugs, they love
the sunflower stalks
all bristly and thick,
juicy and hairy,
the piecework shadows
of the dahlia leaves,
the falling petals
of the climbing rose.
This year they are
everywhere, efficient,
deadly, peaceful enough
to those of us too large
to eat. The garden is
haunted by conenose,
wheelbug, milkweed
assassin, furled beaks
under every leaf
working both ways,
injecting the venom,
sipping up the melted
guts from inside
after the venom works,
sweet as a milkshake
made of meat.
Two gray wheelbugs stand
on a sunflower leaf,
one holding a victim,
one considering the offering
like diamonds: big enough?
This is love
among the assassins:
the long antennae
spanning the summer
like calipers measuring
an always diminishing
sweetness and heat,
the silky backs'
precise, bloody toothed gears
turning the world.
when it whispered in my ear,
a pink whorl
of another order,
was in the sea's own language,
hush, hush. The waves brush
the shoreline, kiss the sand. They
do not diminish its smooth skin,
its lovely body. We only borrow
these shells, for a short time. The Trade
Winds caress the palms, make green music
of their very own. Sunlight filters
down through the canopy, paints
the leaf litter of the forest floor
in golden tones. Listen, listen.
In the pre-dawn gloom of my waking
A fly is attempting to speak to me.
An early fly, a most unseasonable fly.
A pink, distinctly human tongue struggles
against the mangling bites of furious mandibles.
It is trying to tell me something of our common nature,
a relationship which I do not want and did not ask for.
Its buzzing irritates me almost beyond endurance,
yet the false compassion of courtesy bids me
to listen for speech I suspect but cannot hear.
In the thousand reflections of each eye
I recognize the sufferings of a fellow being.
In each facet quivers a different image —
a spider, the ceiling, my own distorted features,
the lamp, the dresser, all the kaleidoscopic
commonplaces of our mutual situation.
I strain my own eyes toward him, seeking larger meanings.
I want to experience the profundity of this moment.
I want irrefutable evidence of spiritual connection,
a distinct sign in each refraction of his vision:
a planet warm and turning, for instance,
or a tiny moon in orbit, frowning, and beyond the moon
galaxies whirling pinwheels of delight.
But I see only the ranks of my own mirrored features
staring back in their agonized legions.
So much I could tell him. So much hope to be given:
In these latitudes the manure of south-facing pastures is far richer
than the sun-deprived patties of the northern slopes.
A dead fox lies in the alders behind our neighbor's barn.
It is March. The mud time is coming.
New seed will soon take, and our fortunes lie fallow.
Under the frozen sod lie regions of great turmoil and transformation.
Deep under the water, the sand is ribbed
like the roof of a mouth. You can see it
at low tide. At high tide, it's just another
secret, something else boiling beneath the waves.
The female horseshoe crab waits
for a full moon, for high tide,
heaves herself over the ribbed sand
to the shore where the males, half her size,
cluster. One will climb upon her back.
Brown plate armor, tail a rigid sword,
one tectonic groove like a fault,
and at her rear, a fringe of spikes.
She climbs up the beach slowly,
every few feet digging in the sand
with her scorpion legs to drop
another twenty thousand eggs.
She drags the fertilizing male behind.
It is difficult work. In her thick shell,
with her four eyes, her kind lives
through extremes of heat and cold and salt,
can go a year without eating, can survive
high doses of radiation. Her kind
lived with the dinosaurs.
A hungry audience: ruddy turnstones
that flew a whole week nonstop,
down one-third of their body weight;
red knots: semi-palmated sandpipers
from Surinam, Tierra del Fuego,
the Argentine pampas. Their eyes
are the abacus beads that count each egg.
Two new generations, bird and beast,
are mothered by Queen Horseshoe.
She is the template for a whole world
of mother-want: implacable,
unyielding in her singular mission.
Soon her work will be done.
Then the eggsthose not eaten
will rock in black atavistic ocean,
learn the art of independence,
creep along the ribbed bottom,
slowly grow their armor,
their four unseeing eyes,
their rigid barbed tails, inherit
that durable spiky crown.
My husband is saving the worms again.
All night, heavy rain, now the driveway crawls
with worms, afraid of drowning, but so dumb
they will broil to death in the sun, except
for my husband who picks them up,
one by one, places them on the still-wet grass,
then drives to work without even washing
his hands. I imagine him in his office sniffing
his fingers for the earthy scent of worms,
and I remember being 6 and loving
worms, collecting them in a worm bin,
a five-pound pickle bucket, so I understand
his affection. I filled my bin with a bedding
of peat moss and soil, soaked and squeezed it
by hand, punctured breathing holes in the lid.
I took a trowel into the garden and dug
for worms. Pink, gray, and reddish-brown.
The long fat ones I loved best, the way they shrunk
and stretched when touched. The way they reared
their heads. I fed them chicken mash, decayed leaves,
and kitchen waste. I wanted my worms to live.
No eyes, no ears, no backbone, no legs.
Each a tube inside a tube, like a knife in a sheath.
Hermaphroditic. Conjoined by a slime tube.
My worms multiplied. I imagined the five pairs
of hearts, their blood, red like mine.
This was nothing to do with sex-I was 6!
This was tactile, olfactory. I wanted the feel, the smell
of worms in my hands, on my skin.
Sometimes I lay down on the floor and let worms
crawl across my belly. Once I put a worm in my mouth.
When I was 7, I upended the bin and freed
the worms, imagined them sliding
through the earth, finding their way home.
Some days I can hardly wait until my husband
comes home, and puts his hands on my skin.
"Historically, the genes that have been found in worms have played an important role in humans as well."
-Dr. Pamela L. Larsen
I'd prefer to have someone,
ideally my father,
loading me to the chin,
my arms stuck straight out
like a forklift, but a
wobbly wheelbarrow
will have to serve to bear
logs across the lawn to shedside
where they can proceed
with their weathering.
Wood lifted from the bottom row
reveals a trove of bugs.
Stunned by the sudden sun,
they don't wait around to perform a song
as some spotlit entertainer might.
Millipedes slip into 50th gear
and disappear, two beetles head
for the hillstufts of dead grass
leaving behind
a magnificent night crawler,
pink-white, lightly moist,
plastic-looking in its perfection.
Laying the languorous worm the length of my hand
I dream of a record-size bass
yanking bobber down
to brown depths of pond,
a reverie that clings long after
I've returned the eyeless thing
to earth. As if it had sensed
its future inside a fish,
the crawler stretches long, then longer,
retracts, then squirms for dear life,
leaving me, hapless human,
to consider kinship,
the roles that fathers
and worms play
in the shaping of sinews,
of genes and world views.
Faith, Hope, and ParasitesWhatever you do for the least of my
brethren, you do for me.
Some people are well, just hopeless.
Others hope beyond all reason.
Two sanguine scientists from London's
Natural History Museum hope
to rouse our sympathy for the possible extinction
of certain lice and fleas and worms.
They are, you see, too host specific
for their own good.
When the passenger pigeon, Columbicola extinctus, passed away Campanulotes defectus, its feather louse
passed on too. (Even their Latin names seem
the echo of neglected tragedy.)
The relative worth of louse or bird,
the scientists suggest, should perplex us.
Just as we care for the mountain gorilla
Or the great gray whale we must well,
they care! And hope you do
for the least of the fallen sparrows.
As we hope some one/some thing
will grieve for us
when the forest of our feathers
has turned to dust.
Although these desert ants don't
have the wealth of neurons
pilgrims or homing pigeons
can draw upon, they know
where they have been and knowing that
come home again by ways different
from the ways they went (if you'll
forgive the awkward phraseology).
Each ant apparently retains
a map of rocky, rough terrain,
following the map and not
their nose (or, more properly,
not their antennae or their tarsi).
Those tiny ganglia we are
so reluctant to call brain
read the maps and tell six legs
to follow them, leaving us wondering:
How many transistors could
dance within brains that are smaller
than heads of proverbial pins?
Amy M. Alvarez is completing her MFA at Stonecoast, the University of
Southern Maine's creative writing program. Originally from New York City, Amy
currently resides in Boston.
Raised by wolves on the eastern shore of Maryland, Catherine Carter now teaches at Western Carolina University. She has one book of poems, The Memory of Gills (LSU, 2006).
Biologist Robert M. Chute's poem series, Thirteen Moons, has been republished with translations in French and Passamaquoddy. He also has a chap book collection, Settling In, relating to the settlement of Windham, Maine, where Thomas Chute was the
first settler in 1738.
Barbara Crooker's books are Radiance, winner of the 2005 Word Press First Book
Award and finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize and Line Dance, (Word Press, 2008) winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence.
Annie Finch is author or editor of fifteen books, most recently Among the Goddesses and The Body of Poetry. She is Director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at USM.
Lillian Baker Kennedy practices family law in Southern Maine, teaches
"Thinking About the Arts; Thinking Through the Arts" online for USM and lives in an old
cape near the sea.
Carl Little Carl Little is the author of Ocean Drinker: New and Selected Poems. His
poems have appeared in various journals, and in the anthology The Maine Poets. He lives on Mount Desert Island and works for the Maine Community Foundation.
Diane Lockward, author of Eve's Red
Dress and What Feeds Us (Wind
Publications), has published her poems in such journals as the Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner.
Native Mainer, Patricia Smith Ranzoni, writes from outback Bucksport. Featured
at "Words from the Frontier" (poetryinmaine.org) and published across the country
and abroad, she has five books out.
Kim Roberts is the author of two books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007) and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH, 1994). She is editor of the online journal
Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Her website: www.kimroberts.org.
Jim Glenn Thatcher is a high school drop-out with both a baccalaureate
and graduate work in History, and an MFA in Creative Writing. He currently teaches
at Andover College in Lewiston.
Kelley White has returned to her home state, New Hampshire, after 30 years
of pediatric practice in inner-city Philadelphia. She is recipient of a 2008 PA Council
on the Arts grant in poetry.
Bill Yake lives in western Washington State, one of the world's richest habitats for
rain forests, slugs, and fungi. His full-length poetry
collection: This Old Riddle: Cormorants
and Rain is available to those who persevere.
