Poetry in America

Summer of the 17-Year Cicada

73 suMMer of the 17-year cicaDa Their husks cover the trunk of a giant catalpa the girls call the swing tree, though our old neighbor calls it a deer tree for the gutted carcasses that hung there in hunting season. The girls fear the split, brown shells stuck to bark, to leaves, to blades of grass, hung even from the swing’s ropes, or anywhere a bug lurched free and emerged, a new thing of glass wings and red, beaded eyes. They hate the thrumming that rises in shimmering waves like heat over asphalt on hot days, so loud they can’t hear one another at their games which require incessant narration: pretend you are married; pretend I’m the baby; pretend someone’s buried under the bald patch in the grass. They beg for butter to lure the bugs into bags they will smash. Listen, I say, this brood deserves life as much as you do! Harmless miracles sprung from underground grubs, loudest bugs on the planet, Cicadidae magicicada. Some Greeks believed they resemble the souls of men who loved the dialectic so much their bodies shriveled up. But the kids don’t listen, and truth be told, I, too, hate their shrill, muddled mating, the way they lunge at my face and hair when I mow 74 between the lilac and mock orange. We hope for quiet, cool mornings, recite the life cycle and count weeks. Soon this frenzy will be done, and when the cicadas return these girls will glow with their own inescapable hum. ...