August, Cicadas, Memory

Around midsummer, when the nighttime drone of cicadas gets really loud in the mid-South, the shells of molted cicadas start appearing on tree trunks and leaves. They always seem like a backhanded message from my brother Thomas, who died sixteen years ago this week. A poem of mine, “The Last Joke,” explains why.

This poem was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize: once by the Spoon River Poetry Review, after its publication there in 2008, and again in 2015 by BrickHouse Press, which had published my collection The Wheel of Light and chose this poem as a nominee for the Best of Small Presses Pushcart that year. The poem was also singled out for praise by Spoon River editor Bruce Guernsey in his essay “Letters to the World,” which appeared in The Café Review in 2009 as part of roundup of poetry editors’ comments on how they decide what to publish.

So here’s my shout-out to August sadness and cicada shells:

The Last Joke

My last trip home before my brother

fell, spiraling down,

out of his green prime

(the orchards in full leaf—

cows wading through thick grass

straining to hear over the sound of their cud

the gears of his truck

the clang of the gate

an oath or two borne their way

on the summer breeze)—

my last trip home before his lungs seized up

with a rare and deadly condition

first identified in veterans of tropical wars,

before his blue amazed eyes flicked toward us

over a hospital gown, his bulky forearms

brown and hard as split wood

resting so strange on a bedsheet—

before the time when his dirt-caked boots

leached by long days of their shine

sat empty beside his guitar,

his cases of worn books,

on the table his caps, the day’s mail—

before all that, home for a visit,

I got in my car to find

hooked to the fabric over the driver’s seat

a cicada shell, split down the back,

pale, nearly transparent, light brown,

raising its little barbed feet in attempted menace.

Or prayer. Its bulbous dry eye-skins glared

as I plucked it off the upholstery,

and I shook my head, startled into a laugh,

thinking: a brother’s way of saying hello,

trying to get a rise out of me,

even now. Forty-nine, and this is his towel-snap,

the affectionate pop of his rubber band

sailing across the room.

I didn’t know

it would be a last message

before he split his own skin

and vanished

into whatever sort of rise

might be granted, not to be seen again

but only heard, heard in the roaring absence

that towers over my head, like a chorus

unseen, stacked in the trees day and night, that twangs

like a giant rubber-band choir, a choir of curses

borne on the breeze.

He didn’t know

when he stuck it beside the visor (cracked carapace,

buggy salute) where he was going,

what he was finding out soon.