Why are Cicadas so Cool?

I love cicadas so much. I think there should be some sort of spiritual festival in August of September called the Festival of the Cicadas. They make the dog days beautiful and mysterious. The days are so tired in this drought. The cicadas sound like a slow sad tambourine or like the long sigh of evening and long hours.

Not always though. Sometimes there are a lot and they sound like urgency. If I didn’t know they were tree-dwelling insects what would I think of that sound? I’d think the trees I pass under were filled with rattlesnakes, or ravens, with a voice like walnut shells, or spirits who speak in tongues. When I walk under a tree with ten thousand cicadas making their gypsy shaking music, I want to belly dance if I knew how.

Here’s a cicada poem.

***

Tree Voices in the morning-

white light spotting

a falling of a waterfall

a foamy gurgle

a silver cat purr.

Tree Voices in the evening-

yellow tambourines round as the sun

tiger growls in my time of great sorrow

rattlesnakes who rattle trees

shamans who Shake, and Stop danger.

sagas

(above: Melissa and I long ago circa 1998 when we first started writing this story)

Not long ago my sister sent me six new chapters of the Fehran story and I was reading them more avidly than I read the last Harry Potter book (which is really saying something as Harry Potter allowed for neither eating nor sleeping). When she finishes this section, we will be almost finished.

Fehran will be a (probably really long) illustrated novel. Missy (actually as she is now a grownup she goes by Melissa calling her that feels weird for me) offers this description of the book:

“Fehran is a dark fairytale about how a broken heart can consume the whole world. It is set in two kingdoms. In one, a tyrant king searches for something to feed his ambitions. In the other, seven magical princes and their sister grow up and nourish the seeds of tensions that will destroy them. The story follows how the two kingdoms crumble the closer they are intertwined, as a great betrayal brings love, escape, revenge, and finally losses that cannot be repaired.”

The story began actually years ago. I was nineteen pretending to work in a temp job in Houston, but as they had actually nothing for me to do, I just stared at the computer screen and imagined a story in my head that played itself out before my eyes without effort, like a secret tv. Missy was sixteen, in high school and a big fan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It turned out she too was imagining and dreaming a story. By combining our two stories, we found an excellent form of entertainment.

This was nothing new; we had been inventing stories together our whole lives, the notes of which filled many manila folders and which we called Sagas. Most of the earlier Sagas were about hot tempered brave ladies in Victorian times who fought pirates or something. But this new one was different. We called it Fehran after the world in which it took place. We even started writing it down. After all, the Brontes had written down their Gondal story, the one the children had all imagined long before Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. We wanted ours to last also. I had to draw pictures of all the characters because I like to know how people look. Soon we were writing a book.

We never finished. I went to New York to study art; Missy went to Rice in Houston to study anthropology, and Fehran went the way of the other childhood sagas. Ten years went by. I don’t really remember why I started writing Fehran again. I was unemployed, always a blessing for artistic endeavors. Soon Missy was writing it again as well. It has changed a lot from its original version, but the characters, like the two wayward princesses, the seven magic brothers, the waifs Eani and Henri, and the tyrant King, have all remained.

Plum Village and the Moon

Summer in Houston is wearing me out. I’m so sorry Houston. I try very hard to love you in your most difficult times no matter what people say about you. In the beginning of the summer I rode my bike everywhere. I loved the magnolias, the haunted sounds of music coming from Herman Park not far away, the black grackles at Empire café with their blue sheen and their evil dinosaur eyes.

But now it’s August. There’s not much rain. It’s dusty all around Montrose and smells like car exhaust and dried cat poo. It’s okay. It’s also the time of nothing to break the light of the sun. If you go to the rose garden it’s copper needles drying in the heat, little flames of roses, cicada’s sad tambourines, blonde grass, and sunsets so heavy with color they are pressing honey and melted butter through the black trees at dusk.

At this time one year ago I was in such a different place and as they days get hotter, drier, and longer and longer and longer, I like to remember that time. I stayed two weeks at Plum Village, the monastery of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, in the countryside outside Bordeaux, France. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, there was “nowhere to go and nothing to do,” so I spent a lot of time wandering through tall grasses, watching sheep bleat to each other, watching a nun throw back her head and sing the moon up. I wrote so many moon poems there and I wasn’t the only one! Lots of people were into the moon… it’s so different when you can really see it. I so miss the moon and I miss the insect sounds in the field and I miss Plum Village, so I will share some of my journal from that time.

Plum Village Moon Poem

Half moon:

parts itself

pushing out

like the breasts on a young girl growing

giving birth

or the sky is giving birth to her pale form.

You are growing, like me

you’re giving birth to yourself,

like me.

The moon was a sharp half piece

like the chip off a diamond.

Yellow was soaked all around it.

Fresh as a shot of sun

inside the water, this moon.

If you see a stone under flowing water flashing

It seems to be waving.

That’s the way the stars tremble.

Waxing moon:

a rose kiss

a rose eye

an opening eye.

pink moon playing

bobbing in a rainbow

rolling in the trees.

Full moon:

now you turn towards us your full face.

Now you show up, you open your eyes wide.

You are awake.

I and the corn and the flute insects wait for your voice.

A mother is come home.

Full Moon Festival

Down by the lotus pond the children

are holding rushing sparklers.

What’s that immense silent firework

showering sparks behind the trees?

Plum Village Insect Poem

The insects are earth’s singers.

I hear tambourines. The night is full of a thousand tiny bells.

And reedy flutes, rattling grass.

But a bird’s song is sweet as a baby laughing,

a brook in the forest,

a surprise of bright flower.

If I find you, smaller creature,

in the shower or the hallway,

you are green and glazed with gold.

Your legs are blue. Your eyes are soft.

Your legs catch at my finger like the bow catches a violin string.

I have to carry you out into the soft blue night

And lay you on the first leaf I can reach

A leaf in a darkening linden tree

So you won’t die.

Spiders in the shower

you ride so high

you weigh nothing on your eight airy stilts.

Even a drop of water

will crush you high world

but I’m careful

***

The point of Plum Village Buddhist teachings though, is to live in the present moment, which right now means H-town. So I will try to have some nice poems about shiny, trembling, plenteous roaches and fluffy feral cats as soon as possible.

Learn more about Plum Village here:

http://www.plumvillage.org/