THE THREAD | Grasshopper & Cricket
Hello! Last week I asked you all for prompts, questions, and topics. You delivered. I’ll spend the next few weeks sharing poems, stories, and essays in response to what you’re sending me — and it’s not too late to send me a new prompt. Good times.
If you pre-ordered a book I’ll have an update soon. And if you had every good intention to pre-order a book but forgot or missed the date, well, I have good news. There will be one more brief window in the next few weeks to get in on the pre-order. Stay tuned!
Last week my friend Vern emailed and asked me to write a sonnet. Vern said, “Leigh Hunt wrote a sonnet, "To the Grasshopper and the Cricket" to which John Keats wrote his sonnet, "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket." (Both used the Italian rather than the English form.) What will Andrew Johnson's sonnet on the subject say?”
So without further ado . . .
Grasshopper & Cricket: A Differentiation of Sorts
Mid-summer the yard is coneflower riot:
The blooming blast of color becomes
A canopy over a choir of thrums
And greenleaps of song swell to cease all quiet.
While the winter basement full of belongings
Provides a shadowy castle for creatures
Singing a song with similar features.
But don’t confuse their different longings:
Grasshopper hitches his legs up to bow
Across his own frame like violin strings
And teases any taker beneath full sun
While Cricket crouches in cellars below
And in the darkness grinds with his wings
Thinking its loud chirp might seduce someone except that all it ever really does is draw out of bed an enraged man wielding a slipper and searching under every box and bin and bag looking for the source of the goddamn midnight chirping but Cricket is one sneaky little fucker and slips away amongst this castle of boxes the man himself bone-headedly constructed and Cricket just races about and resumes the chirping and is so dad-gum gleeful about it all while the man can do nothing but smack his slipper against the furnace a dozen times and curse his own accumulations before finally shuffling back to bed where he will nightmare himself being swatted to death by a chirping slipper and wake much too soon to the quiet he had longed for.
What I’m currently reading: Jenny Offil’s Weather, Jenny Offil’s Dept. of Speculation, Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity
What I’m currently listening to: The Marfa Tapes, Ruth Moody’s These Wilder Things