Club Icarus

A Democracy of Devils

34 A Democracy of Devils The Asian Tiger is weak as flyers go, a lifetime radius of maybe two hundred yards and yet made in Taiwan, made in Vietnam, she is now in Lebanon, and here she is in Italy, in France in Bolivia, Spain, Cuba, and the Netherlands and in ’85 coming to Houston in a crate of recapped tires, lands now in old New Bedford where Novembered Ishmael sailed toward Nantucket. A spring of dumping rain wakes her season early. Aggressive as a fever she is the forest day mosquito, not hiding in the woods until ballpark dusk to suck, nor slipping the hide flaps of our morning tents. She prefers the human city: the plugged roof gutters, old tires holding water, roadside trash, those bird baths forgotten, sewers and flower pots: all the wrappers of our sugar. Only the female needs the blood meal 35 but she cannot drink full for her eggs in one feeding so she jumps hosts, becomes a vector for West Nile virus, for dengue fever and encephalitis. The jungle of pathogens paved to stay away come silver striped, flits into our baby yards, organized around a diet of invention and need. Does she share our mad? Need she harpoon a god? Can this small brain think thoughts? Desire a coupled hell? Drag the judge at last to the bar? At least then there would be justice in ovitraps and DEET. Would the old algebra add up: eye for eye, a leg for an egg. For we are eating up all the nests. North and west shrinks even as it expands. Ah, were this the reason, the cause, for what’s in karma’s velvet paws. But there’s shit beyond what is written on these dusty cells; this the only handspike that digs into the masts, that winches the windlass. No, we are not the whale nor meant to be a part of good and evil’s big budget productions. There are no villains, just the quick 36 and then the extinction. For the redundant mobs, the brains begin to swell with febricity or the fog. The bat houses are filled with white flags and while there is hope some say in the Anisoptera only our coughing children still believe in dragons. ...