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