It shouldn’t be so difficult, finding a harm-free way
to love the world, or at least to love those parts of it
that we love. But vipers are legion. The codling
moth that you cannot coddle, the leaf curlers
that make a rolled scroll of leaves. Think Dead
Sea: brown, dry, web-covered, and speckled
with black grains of caterpillar shit. Another
leaf curler might admire it, like a developer
envisioning in a wooded parcel a winding
street of tract homes, all more or less identical,
that only a human could find beautiful.
Squirrels are another thing. They take and take
and stuff their burrows, not their stomachs.
You can see them running along the back fence
clutching a small unripe apple like a kid at the shore,
beach ball held out in front: the obvious delight
in its hoarder bounce. Then going back for another.
Then another. Up close—bring your face
right to the cage—it looks at you side-eye, growls
and barks low in its throat like an angry dog.
Pesticides cloud in the early morning air.
This time of year, the midges that needle
everything, that drink at the edge of the clear pool
of your eyes, that will land brazen on your lips,
keep clear of you and the droplet stream
erupting from the wand you aim, vengeful God
with a yea and a lo. And it is a little intoxicating,
seeing all manner of flying creature rise
at your instigation, though of course some must,
unnoticed, fall. Yes, I think of the bees—
and also the pyramids of grocery-store apples
troubling the line between what we do and don’t
call natural. Squirrels are harder yet: Baited
with apples they themselves knock off the trees
along with a boutonnière of foliage, they practically
trap themselves. I’ve seen it: the metal door
falling guillotine-like behind them, and how
human their startled turn, as if you could draw
widened eyes and the surprised O of their mouths
right on their little faces. I swear they know.
The world long ago compelled us to take a side—
or maybe we just took one. If we struggle now,
it’s only to take that side sustainably. No one
much disputes our proposition of mastery.
Or to put it another way, would it have still
been Eden without apples? And unless
there were no insects there, Adam must have
sprayed something. Squirrels don’t struggle long
when you drop the cage in water. It was hard to do
only that first time. And really, not even then.
Benjamin S. Grossberg’s books of poetry include My Husband Would, winner of the Connecticut Book Award, and Sweet Core Orchard (both from Tampa), winner of a Lambda Literary Award.
Photo by Jörg Bauer on Unsplash
