Small Beneath the Sky by Lorna Crozier

Author:Lorna Crozier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SIAA0I03, book
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 2010-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

first cause: insects

flies

Surely they’re the shrewdest. The ones who started it all, needing light to pull them from the cold, warm their blood so they could do the thing they’re named for. There is nowhere you can’t find them. In outhouses on the farms they’re big as marbles and just as shiny. In the kitchens of fancy restaurants, in garbage dumps, in pastures, in huge cathedrals where no one blesses them, they wash their faces before and after every meal. Their gaze is ancient and compounded, going back before the Fathers who set down rules in books. That buzz they make, think of it as the only song that lasts forever, the one the whole world knows in the darkest chamber of the heart.

grasshoppers

They come instead of rain, but they rain down, fill buckets and troughs and flood the ground, green and slippery underfoot. You’d think their mouths were full of teeth, so noisy their jaws when they chew. In their leaps from place to place there is nothing more graceful, more dolphin-like. The farmers have laid out a feast for them across the fields. Absent for a year or two, they return, prodigal, and there are lamentations and the pulling out of hair amidst the demented clicking of their wings. Arrogant and regal, they have been inside a pharaoh’s head; they have been a pharaoh’s dreams.

dragonflies

Of every insect’s relationship with time, the dragonfly’s is most exquisite. On Earth before the dinosaurs, the golden ones are from Byzantium, fashioned to be gilded spokes on the wheels of a machine that measures the integers of what gets lost. No matter what their colour, they’re lovers in the air, the male on top clasping her neck, his long body arched and curved, and she keeps flying. Passionate, of course, yet elegant and austere. You’ve seen the carapaces they leave, that they crawl out of to unfold in the sun their new transparent wings to dry. Few insects are slimmer; few more eloquent. The sound they make above the slough, among the bulrushes, is like the watch of your beloved when he drapes his forearm across your shoulders and falls asleep.

miller moths

Nothing to commend them, unlike the luna or hawk or white-lined sphinx. Miller moths are the colour of dirt. The length of your thumb, they’ve broken off from clods of summerfallow and grown the dull, ponderous wings that heave them through the air. No one would mistake them for butterflies or angels. Gravity’s insect, they seek you out. Who knows how they get in, but they blunder into your room, batter the window behind the blind, land on your pillow with a small thud and crawl into your hair. Their dust bears no resemblance to pollen or the finest flour sifted on a pastry board. Across the wall and counterpane, they drag their wings and leave a grimy smudge, dust with some oil in it, close to what we must become.

mosquitoes

She gives you ample warning. Singular or in a swarm, her insistent whine cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.