The Brooklyn Rail

The Book of Beetles

I wasn’t sure the death beetle existed.
But then it fluttered into my life.
It perched itself on little chains
between insanity and love.
A space I assumed native to the death beetle.
For years it made my ribs its home.
Though the death beetle can only be the harbinger
of one thing. A mistake I realized
a decade later. Bodega shoppers behave
like tourists. They emerge from nowhere
except the foreign time of childhood.
Where people pumped gas for a nickel.
Then the death beetle entered.
With whirl and whoosh, the delicate
screech of a dial-up modem.
My parents redid their mortgage more
times than they ever kissed in public.
At 15, I swore to never ride a rollercoaster
but then I had a crush. And lo,
the death beetle arrived through high school
leading me to conquer all my fears
and copulate into a simple sock.
On summer nights the Gospels would hum
into my goat-like ears through the
lonely valleys of shit. An adult,
I went to shop for vintage clothes
and pay for movie tickets on a credit card.
It was near a park fountain in the city
some spring eve the death beetle returned.
As if a letter borne from a vision.
It took the shape of a favorite person.
The inscrutable clutch of its jaws both
flimsy cheap and altogether swift.
But the gift of its silent precision
was not unlike a tiny velvet box.
Inflict pain; avoid suffering. Become
passion. I was gutted like a silver fish.
I had not been sick for many years.
Nor confused myself for a fabled thing.
I squandered no big resistance.
I took to naked nimble music and
did not bother with the usefulness
of obdurate regret. I worked my
ankles; swore against compromise.
Death’s commonplace is suburbia.
But the death beetle is keen to survive
from time to time, thriving how it can
on noiseless soundless wings.
Setting failures aside, I named
betrayals after friends, forgetting
whom to blame and whom not to.
Like a large board of basic wood,
I sandwiched up along the street.
Sometimes stood on curbs waiting
for a turn or sign to move again.
And looking through certain books,
bored to death on certain afternoons,
my life resumed its ordinary shape
in the illness of numbers and letters
among desperate lost positions.
I nursed grief. I blew my life up
once or twice, unsure which was
accidental. My apartment is littered
with dirty clothes and feels
like it belongs to someone else.
I want for nothing and seek it.
But without the death beetle squarely
in view I find myself misused.
When I was twelve my father spelled
Yugoslavia with his eyes closed correctly
and I remember crying out in awe.