Imperial Virus (Scarab)
summer 2020
In the time of the virus, when it was galloping through us
like any hoard or host, establishing its empire
were we had been used to exerting our own,
I made the acquaintance of a large cicada.
At first I thought he was a burr. He had affixed himself
to the side of my sandal like a brooch.
As I realized who he was, I could feel I was about
to be frightened: stopped myself. He was like
a little god, with an ancient, mournful face.
He was dusty. Rachel took him off my shoe
and put him in the grass, but he struggled there.
He had curved forearms, like a sloth, and like a sloth
was clumsy and appealing. So I took a stick
and offered it to him, all the while talking to him
and he took it, with all six of his legs, and held it
with some real strength,
as I carried it to the Norway maple
and leaned it in a wrinkle of the tree, to which he then
transferred himself. Then I sat down
and we humans resumed speaking again
about nothing, sitting outside in the heat
in our masks, with our chairs spaced
a grave’s length apart. When I found
I missed him, I went to the tree but he, again like a god
was not there. I looked again and again
all afternoon, but he was never seen again and never
sang. Yet even to be visited for a moment by such a personage
seems precious beyond lapis, beyond golden scarab, so
forgive me, I put him in the terrarium of this poem
against the loneliness of having been abandoned,
in this empire of virus, by solitude and fellowship alike.
— for Rachel Gordon