WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.600 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.600 --> 00:00:08.340 align:middle line:84% The next poem opens with an epigraph by another person 00:00:08.340 --> 00:00:11.850 align:middle line:84% who's writing I love, Henri Fabre. 00:00:11.850 --> 00:00:14.340 align:middle line:84% The poem is called, "The Entomologist's Landscape." 00:00:14.340 --> 00:00:17.880 align:middle line:84% And it opens, "I go the circuit of my enclosure 00:00:17.880 --> 00:00:19.530 align:middle line:90% over and over again." 00:00:19.530 --> 00:00:22.260 align:middle line:84% I don't know if you've read any of Fabre's work 00:00:22.260 --> 00:00:24.510 align:middle line:84% on the secret life of the insects. 00:00:24.510 --> 00:00:27.270 align:middle line:84% But I think in part as someone who's 00:00:27.270 --> 00:00:29.850 align:middle line:84% been working in a university, I always kind of held him out 00:00:29.850 --> 00:00:30.810 align:middle line:90% in front as a model. 00:00:30.810 --> 00:00:36.330 align:middle line:84% Because he taught until he was 55 and then 00:00:36.330 --> 00:00:38.520 align:middle line:84% retired to this rocky piece of ground 00:00:38.520 --> 00:00:41.130 align:middle line:84% and spent the next 30 years walking 00:00:41.130 --> 00:00:47.190 align:middle line:84% around studying insects and writing about them beautifully. 00:00:47.190 --> 00:00:51.150 align:middle line:84% Victor Hugo called him, the Homer of the insects. 00:00:51.150 --> 00:00:53.820 align:middle line:84% In this poem, Henri is Henri Fabre. 00:00:53.820 --> 00:00:55.710 align:middle line:90% Little Paul is his son. 00:00:55.710 --> 00:00:58.390 align:middle line:90% And I've never seen the film. 00:00:58.390 --> 00:01:01.890 align:middle line:84% But I heard The Peacock Moth became a Hollywood star. 00:01:01.890 --> 00:01:06.970 align:middle line:84% There was a film made about her in the '40s. 00:01:06.970 --> 00:01:08.900 align:middle line:90% "The Entomologist's Landscape." 00:01:08.900 --> 00:01:12.040 align:middle line:84% "He picks through the couch grass, here 00:01:12.040 --> 00:01:15.160 align:middle line:84% a black eared chat on its nest of blue eggs, 00:01:15.160 --> 00:01:18.940 align:middle line:84% and there in the red clay, a natterjack 00:01:18.940 --> 00:01:21.180 align:middle line:90% bathes its warty back. 00:01:21.180 --> 00:01:27.010 align:middle line:84% Henri crouches, like a scarab in his yellow jacket, and waits. 00:01:27.010 --> 00:01:31.300 align:middle line:84% His son, Little Paul, keeps a birdcage full of peacock moths, 00:01:31.300 --> 00:01:32.230 align:middle line:90% all male. 00:01:32.230 --> 00:01:35.770 align:middle line:84% Downstairs, a female slips off her pale cocoon 00:01:35.770 --> 00:01:37.510 align:middle line:90% and stands shivering. 00:01:37.510 --> 00:01:41.050 align:middle line:90% Wet fur, maroon and white. 00:01:41.050 --> 00:01:45.100 align:middle line:84% On her wings, enormous chestnut eyes. 00:01:45.100 --> 00:01:50.060 align:middle line:84% Henri carries her in a bell jar from room to room. 00:01:50.060 --> 00:01:53.870 align:middle line:84% At night, he and Little Paul turn the suitors loose. 00:01:53.870 --> 00:01:56.510 align:middle line:84% They storm through the cypress to the laboratory, 00:01:56.510 --> 00:01:58.970 align:middle line:84% where they beat against the white gauze bell. 00:01:58.970 --> 00:02:03.260 align:middle line:84% When the bait is right, anything can find you. 00:02:03.260 --> 00:02:05.360 align:middle line:84% I look across the river this morning 00:02:05.360 --> 00:02:08.810 align:middle line:84% where last I saw grizzly batting swollen salmon. 00:02:08.810 --> 00:02:13.580 align:middle line:84% A large man stands in a thicket of raspberries, waving. 00:02:13.580 --> 00:02:17.180 align:middle line:84% He wears a tweed jacket and patent leather boots. 00:02:17.180 --> 00:02:19.280 align:middle line:84% Perhaps it is the cottonwood bud I 00:02:19.280 --> 00:02:24.680 align:middle line:84% smashed, dabbed behind my ear like bloody perfume. 00:02:24.680 --> 00:02:27.440 align:middle line:84% Mother's gone off to Maine in search of a secret island. 00:02:27.440 --> 00:02:29.630 align:middle line:84% She will gather lobster, rub their green bellies 00:02:29.630 --> 00:02:32.030 align:middle line:84% so they hum as they enter boiling water. 00:02:32.030 --> 00:02:33.560 align:middle line:84% On the leeward side, she will meet 00:02:33.560 --> 00:02:37.160 align:middle line:84% a Rockefeller who mows his own boulder-dense lawn. 00:02:37.160 --> 00:02:42.590 align:middle line:84% If I stay in one place too long, grow my hair like a banner, 00:02:42.590 --> 00:02:45.770 align:middle line:84% and for the hummingbirds hang out a red begonia, 00:02:45.770 --> 00:02:49.850 align:middle line:90% whose secret island will I be? 00:02:49.850 --> 00:02:52.880 align:middle line:84% Other than the muscular man, only one person comes. 00:02:52.880 --> 00:02:56.810 align:middle line:84% An old painter with a reducing lens, she grades the landscape. 00:02:56.810 --> 00:03:01.160 align:middle line:90% 00:03:01.160 --> 00:03:04.250 align:middle line:84% The mountains are a bookcase full of shale and lichen. 00:03:04.250 --> 00:03:08.450 align:middle line:84% The trapezoidal lightning, the air that tastes of grape jam. 00:03:08.450 --> 00:03:13.080 align:middle line:84% By all standards, she says, we are sublime. 00:03:13.080 --> 00:03:16.260 align:middle line:90% I myself prefer small scenes. 00:03:16.260 --> 00:03:17.840 align:middle line:90% I would have liked Henri. 00:03:17.840 --> 00:03:20.550 align:middle line:84% We could have spent the day together on our hands 00:03:20.550 --> 00:03:24.810 align:middle line:84% and knees, year after year the same weed lot, studying 00:03:24.810 --> 00:03:28.740 align:middle line:84% the digger wasp as she squeezed a wild bee to her breast, 00:03:28.740 --> 00:03:34.010 align:middle line:84% then turned to lick honey from its gasping tongue."