Cicada

I have five brothers but only two who ever made it out of the womb womb or tomb you can see what a difference a "t" can make in determining life or death now late in July one summer the cicadas appeared     well to be clear we never saw them but oh did we hear them     they made an orchestra     that would put Osmo Vanska's     to shame / long crescendos     of clicking and humming     bursting from the bark     of the ash tree in back     with a fervor that shook     like a fist against the tyranny     of the coming school year and every evening my two living brothers and I would go out on the back deck to munch on Klondike bars and just listen and then the next morning with the dew still clinging to the grass we would go out barefoot to the ash tree and try to find the last night's performers to congratulate them perhaps but all we could ever find were their exoskeletons clinging to the trees / little cicada bodysuits with no one inside and it was frightening we had come looking for artists but had stumbled in on a graveyard the current of past lives still running warmly through it there were other evenings when the sky turned into a firecracker and the clouds fell from their harnesses down through the mesh of wind we would scramble indoors already as wet as old dishrags and peer out the screen door we'd watch the fissures form for just milliseconds in the sky I said it was like angels were spelunking in the canyons of heaven and we were just witnessing the light of the invisible one instant at a time but my brother / always the realist told me it was just electrons looking for the shortest path of contact between the sky and the earth he said the lightning sort of has a mind of its own / it's trying desperately to find a conductor and the rule for conductors is pretty much this: whatever is tallest goes up in flames well one lazy afternoon one of those where the sky turned a sickly green and you knew the Fourth of July was on its way I sat out on the porch and thought what if our old ash tree gets hit would it go out in a pillar of fire would there be any of it left maybe it was my Christian upbringing but I supposed the essence would still have to be there somehow school was an impending rainstorm coming in like a drizzle in those late days / and we were already planning what we'd be doing next year even though we knew we'd forget by then and have to start from scratch next June but all I wanted to do was catch a cicada a real live one not just a husk and so I couldn't wait till next summer when I'd look harder maybe set a few traps who knows but I'd find one well imagine my disappointment when they didn't come back the trees were silent that June and summer ebbed wordlessly into the hands of rain a few years later I had forgotten about the cicadas though they still came up in a poem here and there and my Dad texted me while I was out with friends: "Grandma fell please come home soon" and so I did right away less than a month later she was living in a nursing home and so it was that one Sunday after church we all piled into the van to go see her (rain dancing like pebbles on the drumskin of the Chevy roof all the way there) I hadn't seen her since she fell and as soon as I saw her I'm ashamed to admit I wanted to leave that building right away / call it claustrophobia but that building felt like a coffin the woman I knew would never fit inside it just two months ago she had been baking us rhubarb pies and whistling to songs in her heart filling her days cooking more food than we could ever eat and stubbornly announcing her political views at the dinner table even in her eighties she had always had the tallest spirit of any of us but now here she sat slumped over a table in a building that no one wanted to call a cemetary even though that is what it was her eyes cloudy and bones in a heap she was dead already but then I noticed there was something resting underneath her right hand my Mom asked her "what is that book you've got there" and she didn't hear at first on account of the thunder and the raindrops turning into hail on the asphalt outside but after a while she understood and wordlessly she raised her right hand to reveal an old leather bound Bible the kind everyone has but no one reads and I knew then this woman wasn't weak at all I was looking at her skeleton this woman was going out with her bones showing not a piece of her kissed by fire I still don't think I ever really knew Harriet Lindstrom there was so much there I didn't see but I think I got to know the core of her right at the end when I saw her bones and maybe it's just my Christian upbringing but now whenever it rains I wonder if she's up there with my three other brothers who never made it peering out of the fissures in the sky whenever the lightning strikes and so now as I curl the hair of the girl next to me finding it the shortest path of contact between two people in love I wonder if anyone goes out the way she did anymore is there anyone left who is strong enough to kneel this girl and I love each other like lightning and sooner or later I'm sure to go up in flames ash to ashes as they say it's apoptosis self-destruction programmed into every cell personally though I think there must be more to it I've always identified with Nicodemus     after all the old coot didn't know a thing and neither do I so full of questions I'm sure he was there crouching at the foot of the cross that stood tallest of all at the place of the skull he must have ruminated on that old pun: anagenesis how can a man enter his mother's womb a second time when he is old anagenesis anagenesis womb or tomb one will go empty but not both at once can you see now what a difference a "t" can make in determining life or death