Ghost Gear: Poems

Golden Paper Wasp

GOLDEN PAPER WASP Now it’s Emma May’s porch that I remember, and the knock-kneed skirt hems of the girls who swung on the porch swing, the birchwhite columns solid as live pines, the wind chimes strummed by angels I believed secreted themselves in the eaves. And how, when that golden paper wasp fell from the sky and landed on my ear, everything froze as though one of my winged imaginings had ascended the sun-flashing heavens and streaked backward against the revolution of the clocks: trees no longer moved by wind, cars passing by in gold blurs, the screech of the girls’ swinging scudded to a halt by the bleached-white tips of their Keds— that wasp at rest in the fleshy cradle of my ear. That’s how it came back: the memory of that afternoon Chris and I practiced long bombs between the double doors of his root cellar and our end zone drawn between the peach tree with its single, sad globe of fruit and the Chevy S-10 on its throne of cinderblock and switchgrass. Then, I had no idea what a mining bee was but learned when, leaping, I snagged yet another spiral single-handed from the sky and, landing, heard what later I’d be told was the crunch of my foot in their hive, that matrix of spit, larvae, and roots we’d observed their laboring over all summer 19 and from which they bore upward so fast that by the time I’d sent that football spinning on its nose like a top on the asphalt of the alley, was engulfed by a whirling vortex of wings and stings. A year later I was still known as the kid who tried outrunning a swarm, dashing headlong from state-named street to statenamed street. I missed three weeks of school with a fever and when I started to feel better would leap before my bedroom window, the other kids in the neighborhood playing scared as they ran from our yard, screaming news of the creature that lived in the house on the corner of 52nd Ave. and Park. But there on the porch, I froze, stock still and wide eyed while the wasp foraged the fine hairs of my auricle like a bloom. And I was lucky to be looking west when that flash-green split of the sun unscrolled across the horizon and night, yet again, held its domain. Still, it seems logical to think of the lunar module my mother watched rise from the surface of the moon when I envision how that wasp must have looked when it lifted a wing and lifted from my ear—this long before I understood why my mother told me never take a ride with Mike LeFleur, my baseball coach who always smelled of ham hocks and nickel wine, or why I shivered when the men who prowled our streets 20 in station wagons and coupes rolled down their windows, reached out a hand, whispered, Come. But I knew what it meant the day I turned sixteen and one of those girls from the porch asked me to take her for a drive. She didn’t tell me where she wanted to go but knew the way, and when we got to the local swimming hole and she slipped her skirt from her hips on the edge of a sandbar, I followed the thin trace of her body without a sound. These days, when my wife starts from sleep, it’s usually the sound of our house gathering itself against such quiet. For me it’s the phantom whine of the wasp as it works its way deeper down the tunnel of my ear. For me, it’s anything that lost making its way through the dark. 21 ...