Letter to Johnston from Carlisle

Audrey, the cicadas are still
threatening to leap in ragged clusters
from poplar leaves and spit pestilence
upon this truck-choked town.
Here is their sinister crescendo now—
their voices thrumming with chlorophyll,
with a staccato ill will.
I’ll keep a third eye on them—
their trail of shells, of brittle wings,
of black eyes like the husks of dead planets.
The sidewalks pulse,
but maybe that’s only the ripple
from beefed-up cars ripping High Street
to dismal shreds of tar and oil
and crumbs of taillight.
Thunderstorms lunge across campus
like teenagers slamming doors
on spent childhoods, gasping arias
from tattered lungs.
This town is a factory of noise,
a jackhammer jackhammering inside a proton—
out, out, out—
the first ordinary grasshopper’s brain
to turn black and crackle.
The cicadas might think they’re locusts,
like everybody else, so I’ll bolt
my door, stand watch until dawn
gripping a baseball bat, a skillet, a floury rolling pin,
my bathrobe flowing, curlers in my hair . . . .
I’ll rattle inside my sneakers.
Even the sinister spider—
her web slung taut to catch the universe—
trembles at the center, a tiny black hole.
For three weeks you skated on spiderweb,
your spiral notebook cocooned in metaphors:
what will emerge?
Now you’ve settled back into home,
and bend like a riverbank around hills
old and slow as local barbers.
I hope you’re bending words,
twisting their little thumbs until the words cry uncle.
I hope your pencil is free of termites, that it draws
hieroglyphs from your blood like a mosquito.
I hope it hurts—this is the only way
we re-invent ourselves, our old skin molted and tossed.
All our lives we lift pillows and something rolls away:
a quarter shiny as hope.
Hope hope hope hope hope.
And I hope the New England silence is splintered
only by the snap of balled-up paper,
that your room is a clutter of these crumpled moons.
Audrey, were you born on the Moon,
from one of the ancient lunar wombs
which we don’t even need a telescope to see?
Did you simply spill to Earth, tumble
through ionosphere, stratosphere, biosphere,
all the way to Vermont?
I wish I could say I witnessed it:
some evening at the end of high school,
the sky iced over and starless,
the Moon howling in labor,
its contractions tripling coastal tides,
its umbilicus flailing like a sine curve,
the terrible curve of motherhood
slung between horizons while neighborhood dogs
barked their freezing dogdom,
and I muttered wow from some sloppy suburb
hundreds of miles away, confirming
my disbelief in God . . . .
But I missed it,
too young and dumb for the sublime.
And now, one cicada cycle later,
here in the ribcage of Pennsylvania,
I cannot tell you what to expect from this cosmos,
all the ways you will be surprised,
how you will marvel.
And, because there can be no yin without yang,
how you will weep.
Like I want to now, a single cicada writhing
in its madness, spirals of DNA stabbing brain cells—
leap, leap, leap—
and like a dark ship of moonlight it sails
over porch and tree and rooftop and steeple,
and is gone.

Mike Dockins