I'll read the title poem from the book
and then turn to the newer poems.
This poem "Elegies for the Hot Season"
is in two sections, one dealing with killing
the snails in the garden in California where I grew up,
and the other dealing with burning out
tent caterpillars, which are little, tiny worm-like things
that build webs and were infesting a neighbor's
cherry tree.
"Elegies for the Hot Season."
"Half the year has hot nights like this,
when gnats fly, thick as stars, when the temperature is taken
on the tongues of flowers and lovers, when the just dead
is buried in warm sod.
The snail-pebbled lawns glimmer with slime trails.
And the unworried, unhurried snail tucks
into his dark knuckle, stockaded with spears of grass, safe.
When I first heard the sound of his dying,
it was like knuckles cracking.
The lightest foot can slay snails.
Their shells break more easily than mirrors.
And like bad luck, like a face in a mirror,
they always come back.
Good hunting nights were stuffy as a closed room.
No moon shone, but my father's flashlight,
as if it were Jericho, he circled the house.
And I'd hear all evening the thick crunch of his marching,
the sound of death due to his size 13 shoe.
In the morning, I'd find them, little clots on the grass,
pretend they'd been singed by geranium fire bursts,
asphyxiated by blue iris flame, burnt to shadows
under the strawberry blossom.
The fuchsias bled for them.
White-throated calla lilies, maintained appearances
above the snail slum.
But the slow-brained pests forgave and fragily
claimed the garden the next hot season,
like old friends or avengers.
Today, I watch our neighbor celebrating May,
ringing around the besieged cherry tree, his haunted maple,
brandishing his arson's torch through the tents
of caterpillars.
He plays conductor, striking his baton for the May music.
And the soft, fingery caterpillars
perform, snap, crackle, pop.
They plummet through our holiday of leaves like fireworks,
or shooting stars, or votive candles, or buttercups,
under the hex of neighbors want, first fruits of euthanasia,
ripe and red, before the cherries.
And it is over, grown cold as a sunset.
They lie on the grass, still in black
as those who lie under it.
It is night.
Lights burn in the city, like lamps of a search party,
like the search beam of my father's flashlight,
at every swing discovering death."