Friday Poem: "Stag Beetle"

This is another poem that has me pondering how my own memory and perception work, and the possibility that the vivid images I have in my mind don't represent my real experiences. On the Atlantic coast where I grew up, large and exotic-looking critters were rare, but I was always on the lookout. Herbert Zim's Little Golden Guide to North American Insects was a sacred text to me; I sought its signs and wonders everywhere.

Stag Beetle

I was eight years old, and on a bright day
twenty yards from the calcareous seawall
on the Chesapeake, among mint green
lichen and spiky husks of gum tree balls,
he waited for me with his proud antlers,
polished coffee brown carapace
real and big as a toy
that might snip off a finger.
Presented on a pedestal stump, crusted
with stale fungus and flagellate mosses
that wiggled in a miniature wind.

Books said adult males were harmless 
despite their fearsome appearance,
so I found a box big enough for a
rabbit or puppy matted the inside
with hastily pulled blades, filled a dish
with water and placed him inside.
All afternoon I listened to his hook feet scraping
on the cardboard and his too-big head
tapping into a corner again and again.

The strange part is that my clearest
memory of the stag beetle 
might be a dream: that night, curled 
in my grandmother’s guest bed, I sat up
quick and hot by the ember of nightlight 
and saw the beetle perched on the
edge of his box, not moving.
Big weak mandibles forked 
like arms, lightning rods,
like penitence or accusation,
watching me, 
tuned to my rodent breathing,
and the room seemed small
the carpet thin and the pillow
a barnacled stone.

This poem appeared in Petroglyph No. 14.