The Insect Collector's Demise

     On mornings free of cloud the insects      mistake my windows for clean platters      of sky and knock against them, seeking entry.

     Some make hardly a sound—a sand grain      blown against glass; but others—butterflies,      for instance, kiss a bit harder and leave behind

     a whiplash of dust. The mind is a jailer      whose job it is to wake us      when we are not sleeping and I

am suddenly the child I used to be, running amuck through the garden with my killing jars and my nets; a child

so in love with the world that she carried pieces of it everywhere so she would never forget. There was nothing beautiful

in such dying, in such bluster and panic. My net had a mesh as soft as a stocking and it held the scent of chemicals and breakage—a bitterness

like tarnished metal. Every day there were items left behind—torn wings like scraps of propaganda, the leg

of a cricket like a dropped hat pin. Forget formaldehyde and ethyl acetate, forget the suspect, precarious terrains

into which all collectors go for a rare specimen; imagine what happens to a child in that moment

     when the matte-black pin, thin as a horse hair,      breaches a cricket's lacquered façade and passes      smoothly, and without resistance, through

     the body beneath. In the killing jar,      the crickets were the worst of all—their leaps      against the glass the music

     of someone fiddling with the small change      in his pocket. What hubris      to think the insects loved their lives

     less than I loved mine. Each one      a verb snatched from the world's mouth.      This is how I grew afraid of details, of all

     the precisions of suffering and fell in love      with landscapes viewed from a distance, where      it was everything I could not see

     that saved me; where, if there were animals,      they were small and clean on the earth's      green manicure: sunlight washing like varnish

     over the backs of black cattle in the fields; sheep,      falling to their knees to get closer      to the sweetest, lower stems of the grass.

     And being rewarded. From a distance      each tree was a green trawl of light.      Too far away to hear the leaves' sad

     fricative or every tiny murder      in the dirt, this was a world      in which even the hooves and the teeth

of the horses grazing under the eaves of an oak had never once hurt the grasses; there were no blast zones of pewter feathers,

no flusters of corruption or scandal on the leaves' plain crockery; no ticks dug-in between the jackdaw's

feathers, not a single moth like a banner in the jaws of an ant. Not a single ant in a blackbird's beak. At the end

of every trouble, I thought, were fields like this, fields like sunlit platforms. God's failed attempts at imagining paradise.

It was everywhere I wasn't: I could step right into it and never arrive; and it was always behind me, where the grass

had already shrugged off the dark kiss of my small boots. And before me the wrestle of the river,

all purpose and no wastage, and I could feel the trout's perfect fit within it where the current grew snug on the inside curve.

     I have wasted my life trying to enter this promise.      I will waste whatever life I have left.       In the inch-deep darkness of a tree's body, the egg

     of the ichneumon, that persuasive burglar, lies      next to the egg of the wood wasp.      What the world gives, the world

then takes away.

• How to Use a Field Guide
• Jude Nutter (bio)

Jude Nutter

Jude Nutter’s first collection, Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), was published in 2002. The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame) won the Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. A third collection, I Wish I Had a Heart like Yours, Walt Whitman, is forthcoming. In 2004 she spent two months in Antarctica with...