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. She makes you slap yourself hard and fast, like an angry parent might. She shrinks your geography, limits where you walk; every patch of grass becomes a bad neighbourhood, the lights shot out, engines revving. At night, when you think you are alone, her feet land among the hairs of your arm with the lightness of an eyelash. When you feel the bite, it’s too late. Small airy thief, she has broken in, stolen what she came for. Warm inside now, she rides the updrafts, flies to open water where she’ll lay her eggs, her need assuaged, her promise fulfilled. You, great provider, who hoard what you could freely give, feel only irritation and the beginning of an itch.
ants
We should be lighting candles around their mounds; we should be writing psalms and offering bread and sugar.
When the soil is frozen and the gravediggers can’t bury the dead, they are life continuing, sleepless in their deepest nests below the frost line. They tunnel under your feet, excavate chambers for their many mansions. One mind, they seem, that never stops thinking. Pulled from the dark after the thaw, pouring from the ground with particles of clay clamped between their jaws, they carry the underworld into the glare; bit by bit, without reward or glory, they recreate the Earth.