Tarn Wilson
The Grasshopper
I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
how he kept his wife in a shell. Were her walls damp
and stringy? Did she carve a door? Did she set her elbows
on a spongy windowsill? I didn’t want to be Cinderella,
a princess in a pumpkin carriage. I wanted a tail: I wanted
to be a soft animal who could adjust her balance. My New
Age mother said I might carry bad spirits. I feared they
clung to my sweater or accumulated in corners, chewed
and gaunt and disguised in shadow. My mother stole
money from my piggy bank. Some summers, I lived
with my father on the docks. I loved the lapping water,
little fish, and dock cats. I had never felt such loneliness.
I wanted a red wagon and a father who would pull it.
I got lost in the swirly eyes of marbles. I collected quartz
from roadsides and trailsides and badly-tended lawns:
fairy tale jewels scattered. I feared vans with no windows.
My only strategy was retreat. I’d make myself long
and flat as a line so I could be mistaken for a horizon.
~
Now I’ve been colonized by little men with pointy
shoes and long to-do lists. Now, sleep is a delicate thing,
carefully tended. Now, I’m afraid to pack my suitcase:
I’ll forget what I most need. I still love yellow construction
equipment, deer eyes with big lashes, granite boulders
under my fingers. I’m in love with lava, melted rock from
Earth’s hot heart. I’m in love with this elusive miracle:
the little salt harvest mouse who eats pickleweed
and drinks salt water. I did not imagine, then, the wars
would keep coming and coming. I’m still afraid it’s my
fault. All of it. I still search for bits of quartz: sometimes
I buy polished eggs and shimmery spheres. I’m confused
about what to give God as an offering. My first
strategy is still retreat, but I have a few more tactics now.
This is what I miss: the grasshopper on my thumb,
heavier than it looks, gripping with its strange hooked
feet, the weight and tension of all that coiled potential.
Even My Ghosts are Rusty
Here’s my super power: give me a sip of your tap water
and I can taste
the rust in your pipes. When I was little,
rust meant docks and boats and salt air and a quiet horizon
and men with strong arms and hands, quiet as stones.
Now I have a dream house by the sea
which flakes away, bit by bit.
The edges of my favorite books have yellowed. My windshield
is pock-marked by bits of gravel. My desire is waterlogged.
Rust mottles the surface of my compass like shadows.
There’s rust in my lasagne.
Even my ghosts are rusty. They creak and move in slow motion.
They leave red-brown tracks on the stairs I chase with a vacuum.
Rust has no magnetism. No rizz.
But rust has hustle. You have to give it that.
It’s bubbling all the enamel on my new, cheap cookware.
Rust takes up more room than the metal it eats.
It frightens our foundations.
Still, there is something heavy and steady and slow in rust
that I like. The reminder that everything is a slow crumbling
and transformation.
Forever and ever.
In my future, when it rains rust, what umbrella will I use?
Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Assay, Brevity, Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work has been published in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in ONE ART, Only Poems, and Potomac Review.
