Poetry Sunday: Insect Life of Florida by Lynda Hull

I must say the insect life of Florida sounds very like the insect life of Southeast Texas. Our days are filled with "their endless thrum." Especially the cicadas. And our nights are now "metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart."

Insect Life of Florida

by Lynda Hull

In those days I thought their endless thrum

   was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.

      In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells

   enameled hard as the sky before the rain.

      All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe

   through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever

      parceled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

   my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

      something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid

   Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled

      to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she

   murmured of alligators that float the rivers

      able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.

   And always the trance of blacktop shimmering

      through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand

   and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding

      white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

until I was lost, until I was part

   of the singing, their thousand wings gauze

      on my body, tattooing my skin.

Father rocked me later by the water,

   the motel balcony, singing calypso

      with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

a net over the sea, its lesson

   of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed

      over his shoes, over the rail

where the citronella burned merging our

   shadows—Father’s face floating over mine

      in the black changing sound

of night, the enormous Florida night,

   metallic with cicadas, musical

      and dangerous as the human heart.