In My Forty-Seventh Year, and: Catawba

In My Forty-Seventh Year

Me walking downcast. Him danglingankle-level above a forest path with nobranches overhead. I glance to the canopy,a good thirty feet up. Thirty feet. Nooverhang closer. Let’s pause for scale —the caterpillar, half-inch long, and his silkjust a glint when wind sends it swingingas if someone has, with an X-Acto knife,cut a vector into the air. And above him,a gulf of nothing. What human has scaledsuch height, has been such a fantasticallyattenuated pendulum? So I stop to watchthe shudder inside him. Is he consuming itor balling the tether between rows of legs,skeining it? Whatever he’s doing, he’sclearly — and at a remarkable rate —rising: the curl and lengthening of his bodysteadying him higher and higher, so thatas I watch he floats from my anklesto my knees to my waist, and in short orderwe are eye to eye. It’s then I think of fear.At my ankles, it was nothing, the fall.Even now, to me, not much. But soonhe will rise higher, to a height from whichI’d be terrified to suspend, to swing upabove the heads of couples strollinghand in hand, with only that filamentand the wind-sway, its ocean-size capsize.Impossible. So I look up again to gaugethe height, and see — because I’m awake to them now, am looking now — a dozenother caterpillars also rising, maybe end-of-day rising back to the trees. For sleep?But how to get the line up there unlessthey’ve kept tethered all day as theyexplored earth beneath them, like humanswalking the ocean floor, an umbilicuswaiting to reel them up. Yet this is height,not depth, height: so like humans danglingfrom skyscrapers — or no, not skyscrapers,because no structures stand nearby, nosolidity at all, so like humans ascendingto clouds, a dozen humans inching upon their own power, to the undersidesof clouds. And when I look back downto find my caterpillar, I start becausehe’s gone, but soon see that he’s not gone,he’s just above me now, four feet overmy head, tensing and ingesting his silk.On this day when I’ve done nothing, whena walk has seemed accomplishment enoughbecause I’ve lacked the will to do more,he’s above me now, ingesting, tensing.I’ve let my life drift to a place with nohorizon, without vertical wonder.

Catawba

They do it overnight, the catawba tendrils,reach and wrap the wire above them —grow and curl, extend and expand. They reachblindly because how else could they reach?And find what they didn’t know was there,what’s been arranged for them, the perfectstructure for their needs. Or as perfectas this man could make it. What happensin darkness, in a single evening —let’s not call it passion, not compare itto human bodies, which also can reach, unseeing,for each other; let’s not think how conducivethe fixation. If I decide a tendril’s notlanded right, I can undo it — carefully — maybehalf the time. The other times resultin damage. Let’s not call it passion, notcompare it to how men can hold each otherin the dark, can coil each other’s bodiesin a green fastness, the interlocking of a desiremore fierce than simple need. We know need;we pass its debased currency daily. We knowwhat blandness its worship comes to. But do weknow this? Overnight, the instinctive triplecoil of a thin tendril, such fierce binding?Let’s not call it passion, not be implicatedin its dumb green living; not take it as justanother reminder from the natural worldof too much mind, how often it fails us.