After the Flood

     How quick the insects bred. For years,
     after the greater beasts had struck out
     for the blue and distant ridge, we saw
     little else. The gnats rose up like sea smoke
     from the muck. The grasshoppers
     stripped the fireweed and kudzu,
     even the dyed stripes
     of laundry, till all that was left
     were white tatters like signal flags, limp
     on the thickened, stirring line. It was years
     before the swallows
     caught up to them. Crawling
     years. Every night my Noah
     went down to where the shingle
     slowly widened. He was remembering
     animals: their heads above the sluggish waves,
     the stirred brown wake
     of their leaving-- the lion, snake-maned,
     leading, the trundling
     hippo, the monkeys catching rides, the giraffe's
     foolish neck sticking up
     like a great sea serpent. He thought
     they might come back, you see --
     Japheth and Shem oaring the little boat. A horse,
     perhaps. At least the dog.
     In later years, he took to gathering
     stones, keeping them in little wall-hung boxes,
     that reached almost to the upturned ribs
     of the roof, the constellations
     of barnacles. He gave me handfuls,
     smooth from the sea, and stinking.
     No matter how I washed them,
     they always smelled
     of flood. I know
     why he did it, though. The water
     made them lovely, awash
     in soft colour, a jumbled rainbow
     in the bottom of the sink.

---

For the second day in a row, a poem came scrambling out while I was lying in bed -- and shortly there after, sitting in bed, hunched over a notebook. You'd think, with all the time I spend at my desk, the muse would keep a more civilized schedule. But oh no.

The business with the grasshoppers eating the laundry is my grandmother's story. I'd like to put this right next "Not a Tragedy," the poem about my grandmother and the grasshoppers, in Lives of the Saints.