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Cicadas

By Karen HolmbergPosted Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

Then, finding you
was akin to finding a scarab
in a sand lot, and I turned up the blue spades

low on the lilac, combed
the buff tassels of bulrush along the shore
for your carapace. And now, larval turns

marvel, turns monster: a swollen horde
drills holes up through Missouri clay,
brutally precise as the spike

of enemy tent-poles. You brooded in the slit
bark of my acacias, then hatched
into the plot of garden I wouldn't yet dig

for seventeen years, when, a thousand miles away,
my teeth clenched in the barricade against
the first tongued kiss, when I pumped

my legs in rage to make the wormy swing-board
vault me skyward, bleeding for the first time, queasy.
Seventeen springs you tunneled in blind grubhood,

unlikely genius of the lacy, brain-like maze
I cut open with my shovel. And now you emerge
in the greatest act of will I've ever seen, blood-

blister eyes bulging under the chitin, splitting the callus
of your brow. You flex your shoulders to
a sudden bulk, and your spine splits at the seam,

freeing wings tagged on like clotted
flippers. On your pale-ivory forehead, between red
eye-bulbs now hardened to the touch, a triad of dots glitters

like a fey tiara, but already your brow
is darkening, obscuring these cabochon rubies; the snout
begins to curl toward your chest like a parrot's beak

and a grillwork develops on your cheeks as on
a toy 50's Chevrolet. From the top
you're all bullhead, the abdomen but a clasp

That bustles up the lacquered train
which has not quite dried aright, crimped by the press
of comrades on the peony leaf. You squawk

and shriek when I dare to touch that organ
which others, having made it to the canopy, have tuned
to a synchronous pulse, an ultrasonic jackhammer

pulverizing thought. Here in such abundance
prepare for torture, for a hook through the head—
the child's shy delight will pass through the eras

of alarm and recoil, maturing to a cool inspection,
to the custom of seeing you as
a lively bait, so muscular it jerks the bobber down, tows it

suggestively out of the shallows.

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Karen Holmberg was a recipient of the 1996 Discovery/The Nation Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Gulf Coast, Bomb, and Paris Review. She won the Vassar Miller Prize in poetry, and her collection, The Perseids, will be published in February 2001.

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