I'd heard the skreek, no frog nor bird,
from the car-port, parked and climbing out,
not far, I thought, that, 'Cicada, cicada cicada',
minded now to lumber to the tree to see,
virtue of some ingenious insect chemistry,
those hardened, split-back carapaces,
thick-limbed monstrosities that hauled
their fearsome claws up near smooth bark,
and now adorn the trunk, their alien sculpture
irrefutable evidence of chthonic escapees.
But a few yards back to the carport and,
'Carl Gustav!' One's plonked behind the car,
green body, tapering under folded wings,
bigger than those resin husks; such delicate legs,
no sharp-clawed girders now, just thin black threads.
I took three photos, each one daring nearer,
till mere inches off thought it dead.
I seized a free paper from a yard chair,
the kind that goes from tree to pulp to print
to bin, no reading intervening, a waste
paid for, until bin, by foolish advertising,
then's suddenly state business and expense.
So, 'Green Grocer', on concrete there so, QED,
named by children, petted or tortured,
a tasty morsel for a hungry bird -
they say
times were when you thronged their summer
singing your six weeks away in vying advertisement
to mate in the heat of the afternoon
and cool of evening.
Now silences are signs of dooms -
sullen or stubborn or dazed, in carport shade.
Sell me a bag of avacados? No? You can't sit there.
These tires will squash you like... like a bug.
I give a gentle shove, but he recovers footing;
I almost scoop him up and he, upended,
banded abdomen, flutters back to dorsal squat.
No really, now. You can't. With that I shovel
the paper under so he travels willy-nilly.
Oh,
upended a second time he's had enough;
and flutters off, first skimming concrete,
then, gaining height, heading for hedge top,
almost competently, at the last I see,
vibrating his green bulk in its wild career.
..............
Children named the green Cicada in Australia 'Green Grocer'.
Chthonic - they spend up to seven years in 'nymph' (monster) form underground sucking sap from roots.
(I keep finding these holes in the garden near roots. The other day I was bordering a plot with some ceramic paver edgings and I dug down to a cavern, it seemed, peering through the slit of half a paver's length. It would not fill up with the loose earth I had about. I wedge-blocked the slit with the paver, gulped and laid the next ceramic not so deep, just in case. There's a whole cicada-nymph world down there as goggle-eyed as the bugs in Wreck-it Ralph, maybe.)
Carl Gustav Young - wrote about coincidences among many other things. I could've blurted, 'Jumpin' Jiminy!' of course, but hey...
