Reading Cicada Wings

What lifts out of water or air or soil, carries
contagion away, what ambient vein, peripheral

membrane, what chemistry informs surfaces
made of hydrocarbons, fatty acids, oxygen-filled

molecules, alcohols, & esters? Think about words
such as paper, film, cell—all seem fragile,

could be pierced by instrument as thin as antennae
of grasshopper—but also how stories circle, do not break,

start over, the way wingless nymphs suckle tree root
fluids, metamorphose from sarcophagi underground,

emerge in pale translucence, crawl, grab, cling, mature
to split-backed exoskeleton, leave that brown-paper-bag-

carcass-shell behind, choose deciduous trees as hosts
for eggs after mating calls from muscle-moved, male,

abdominal tymbals vibrating through summer leaves, cycle
after cycle to wings, more wings—water-repellent, structured, 

layered with spiky cones called nanopillars that repel
microbes sliding down their surfaces until they stretch,

rip beyond repair, dangerous no more: why scientists
study wing scales, latticed in their multidimensional arrays,

that distort bacterial cell shapes until those cells die.
From four nymph-stages called instars to their winged

forms, again & again cicadas move nutrients from soil to
tree to air. Do you see letters in the vein shapes 

on their wing panes where the lines converge—
              W for war, P for peace, or M for more—
as prophecies, or like lodes that fissure stone?

 
Note: For more on the patterns and letters referenced in “Reading Cicada Wings,” see “The wings of war: Some people believed cicadas carried a dire warning.” For information on the antibacterial properties of cicada wings, I am indebted to this article: Jenkins, J., Mantell, J., Neal, C. et al. Antibacterial effects of nanopillar surfaces are mediated by cell impedance, penetration and induction of oxidative stress. Nat Commun 11, 1626 (2020).

Where caves

are deepest, most acoustic,
that’s where art is,
where sounds reverberate

the most, echo
in remote corridors
like percussive hooves.

What spirits chant after,
call out, surround? what ears
heard that subject, verb, object,

horse-ghost? what hand drew
the kick skyward from dappled
fetlock? engraved palm in ochre,

fingers on walls? Who knows
how sound sentenced
into artifact through open

mouth, whistle of wind,
flute-like bone? Word
translates to symbol

like ink through quill,
fern pressed to
fossil, indelibly, or pale,

blind fish sign their way
through cisterns,
flashing, or larvae trail

bioluminescence, blue-
green along damp limestone.
In the darkest caverns

where stalactites ring most
musically when struck,
they are often marked by paint,

their notes twice-storied.

A Wake is a Disturbance

in the water, or a vigil, which whales have been observed
               to keep: a mother, a dead calf, afloat.

Is it love that is summoned nearly 8,000 kilometers
across the South Pacific? That’s 5,000 miles. From Australia,
French Polynesia, to Ecuador, male humpback whales
sing separate songs of desire that repeat in structure
yet evolve almost like a fugue, varied arrangements shared
group to group.

               We used to make each other mixtapes that traveled
               literal miles spooled by car cassette player or spun
               in a clunky Walkman for years afterwards.

Echolocations, harmonics, thwops,
shrieks: sounds adopted across acoustic ranges,
evolutionary, new wave, as it were.

               I still have a mixtape made by a college friend who died
               too young, the handwritten track listing faded to gray;
               as close to eternal as a refrain gets, that reminder: how
               one chord resurrects place or love, each song curated.

Whale songs change, repeat pod to pod, creating mixes
or re-mixes, overlapping themes, something over-loved,
perhaps an attempt to keep a song alive the way a riff
occupies mind & ear until it’s oceanic, the only thing,
spiraling tide of blues, a current, polyphonic rave, ripple.

               Sentience breaks the surface, plume of air,
               then plummets below, unfathomably,
               as whales come & go wordlessly.

Human: buffeting waves of grief, brittle tapes
breaking over too long a distance, sudden breaches, drift,
how we impose meaning onto music as if all songs were ours.

               Years gone—& on the brink, species, coral reefs,
               not in one fell swoop, but deadly enough, as fell meant:
               disastrously.

Scientists say now that humpbacks sang more upon necessity
to woo & commune when fewer of them occupied the seas,
that it’s harder now to find the singing males, that singing less
may signal population growth, that all that singing was evidence
more of loneliness than anything else.

               A wake is a disturbance in the water—or a vigil—
               & requires silence enough to hear the waves,
               the infinite ripples.

Compensatory Curves

I don’t want to see the whale with scoliosis,
the fin whale crooked like a hook when filmed

from above off Valencia’s coast, images
the algorithm feeds into my so-called stream

that I will avoid even though I know the 40 ton
whale exists, despite what I want. What I want

is for the whale to swim without pain.
Humans are more likely to be afflicted

with scoliosis due to our decreased rotational
stability; upright, our spines set loose as vertical

columns; idiopathically, without cause, our trunks
may deform, biomechanically lean off kilter,

but scoliosis is rare in other vertebrates,
and whale anatomy usually protective,

spines less prone to bend under strain,
supported by water, except as congenital defect,

or when injured by ship propellers, a post-
traumatic “compensatory curve,” those findings

mostly post-mortem, but this whale, spotted
by a skipper, another specimen struggling to swim

that I don’t want to see; all I see is the whale afloat
against the blue in my mind (it doesn’t matter what

I want). That gray comma, that broken back,
my own propulsion away, a helplessness against

cruelties of collision—global shipping traffic
on the rise from our insatiable desires, no recompense,

no refuge, only posture—unless we consume—less.

Elinor Ann Walker (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, lives near the mountains, and prefers to write outside. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Bracken, Cherry Tree, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod International Journal, Northwest Review, The Penn Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Plume, Poet Lore, Shō Poetry Journal, The Shore, The Southern Review, SWING, Thimble, The Vassar Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has recently completed a full-length manuscript of poetry and two chapbooks. Find her online at elinorannwalker.com.

Header photo by Pavan Prasad, courtesy Pixabay.