}} Self-portrait, with beetles in sugar |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Self-portrait, with beetles in sugar

Summer almost gone
and the fruit abundant
but still green and hard
on the tree, I rejoiced
one morning at the sight
of something deep-colored
and gleaming on a high
branch: but the clusters
turned out to be Japanese
beetles, helmeted in khaki
green; drunk on sugar,
burrowed deep in the hips
of a ripe fig, its skirts flayed
open in the shimmering
heat. I stepped back, stunned
at how stunned this scene
rendered me; then rapidly
dismayed by the threat
of more widespread
invasion— the idea
of things seething up,
chthonic, from some
underworld. I could find
a ladder, don gloves and
peel them off one by one
from the leaves to drown
in a bucket of water—
but not before remembering
what it was like to myself
be taken; to have thought
in my confusion this
was fate, or simply
the natural order
of things. 
 
 
 
← Luisa A Igloria