by Carey Salerno
On the first evening- which was one of the last of June- that I caught glimpse of a firefly
dizzily
alighting at the corner of the neighbor's patio, three in fact, and what they were deliberating,
I
couldn't say for certain, not knowing fluently the language of firefly, though perhaps they too
were relieved the plodding rain had already blown through by midmorning, that the haze of its
remnant against the heavy peridot blades of grass was a slow vapor rising hot around them
dipping drunk on its slog, blipping, low-slung at the ground, or perhaps they were wondering,
like me, whether the wildfire smoke would in fact descend tomorrow before dawn, burning
the
backs of our throats, planting its harsh scent of raging conflagration all over of our
manicured
yards, forcing us to remain closer to our made-up beds than we'd ever want- the aphids were
also furiously assembling in cumulous clusters along the edge of the lukewarm lake wherein,
as
well, forty-two mute swans preened and dunked their burnt orange bills into the loamy pool
up
to their necks, bobbing buttery tails skyward, up through the gunmetal water, and someone in
our town's online group asked, why am I seeing forty swans in the lake? Which made me
consider whether I, too, wanted to know, or whether I preferred to linger in my curiosity, its
space like the one between the hard flat surface of a table and the body seated in its chair, the
hollow knowledge makes for us between our desire to know and our actual knowing, one a
delight, the other a disaster, always, interchangeable, the split wherein you're not one or the
other but what moves interpolated, delighted by your own refusal to sit or stand, to eat or be
eaten, to accept that something must be one way or the other, like having to call a coyote a
coyote, an aphid an aphid, a swan a swan, or even a swan a sparrow-your own refusal to
recognize what inside yourself is already all of them muddled, and too, a menagerie, already
the
fox, come home to itself in the blackberry den wherein the table is set with itself and itself is
sitting in its place at the head, arms fixed on either tufted armrest, sweaty fur settling into
the
creaking frame, expectedly. Where are we right now, exactly? On a run by the lake, in between
the space of question and answer, in the body in between the body and the table, floating
within the bevy of swans? No, of course it's only a bevy when the swans' feet are flat on the
squishy ground not paddling languidly along the surface of the water, all eighty-four of them
required, the act of which defeats the purpose of such gatherings, as the point of such
amassing
is to create the illusion of impenetrability, to outnumber what would come to kill at least one
of
the white birds, but what hunts and kills a swan I've never seen in action, what might upend
their bodies-the same way they dip below the flat surface of the water to gather pondweeds
and eelgrass in their mouths, to fill their bellies-but just with more blood, alight in the maw
of
what predator devours them, the sparking metal and flint scratching against feathers against
teeth. Don't you know there's no setting a table for that? You can only dim the chandelier if it
has a dimmer switch (did you install one?) and if not, you've already done it all wrong, fucked
all
the eating ambiance, good job, no swan for you, no place setting, no chair with your scribbled
name in front of it, no knife under the crystals sparking against the ceiling like slow firefly
scintillation rising up in the night, having overslept in the hard ground and been slow to learn
how exactly to ignite, to speak in sign, what the flashing draws down, damp, out, and what it
means to be a newborn body made of burnt-back embers, drifting over the sidewalk to the
neighbors', nearer the swans, nearing the aphids who, too, are restless and globular like the
pale green eggs laid in the lake's marshes into bulrush nests by swans, their lawless swarms not
far from the same buzzing inside of you when all the while you go on and pretend it's
otherwise
(go on!), a wild animal having been unwilded in the wild all around you on your last run in
June,
and deny it all you want when the wild comes wanting you to sit at its table head, imploring at
the very least for you to make polite conversation, running toward you even when the night
starts to fall down (and fireflies are the only chaos map to home), its hand on your neck, it's
mouth on your back, wet and unforgiving, your hand on your neck, your mouth on your back,
little living-you'll invite it in. You'll invite it to return, coyote, fox, swan. Firefly, sparrow, the
aphid-a hundred stuck against your chest, their cornicles, their honeydew, their slender
stretched mouthparts that would pierce the skin of everything set before them, exigent in its
green rising, the riparian garden where they suck back trim tart sap, pucker at its briny
nectar,
refuse to dab the corners of their mouths, too, to wipe back their cheeks, their greedy faces,
welcoming instead more wild to settle upon them, to soak into and soften their exoskeletons
long after you arrive home, breathless and limp and, too, as famished.
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