Vector

CHRIS ELLERY

May 8, 2020

Out for a walk the last morning of April

I spy a beetle crossing a sunny drive

on its way to a shady bed of roses.

The trees and sky are full of birds,

and the shadows of their wings

are prowling the insect’s crooked path.

I’m not an ornithologist nor entomologist.

I guess the poet in me makes me stop

to scientifically observe the scene.

The beetle sidles across the aggregate,

a ripe and shiny plum on spindly legs

conspicuous as a roasted turkey on a plate.

It moves and stops, moves and stops,

pretending to be a shadow or a leaf, determined

by a will that every epic hero comprehends.

As I watch and reflect, a fact that I’d repressed

incongruously creeps into the sunlight

of my consciousness. Just yesterday

I read that COVID-19 has killed

more Americans than the Vietnam War.

More than 58,000. And more will die.

I know that stat is a strange vector

to trace in the tangent of a bug,

yet there it sits in me like a body bag.

The sky is a feathery commotion of raptors.

I understand all living things must eat,

and the robins and jays have hungry hatchlings.

But all my being is for the sentient form that crawls.

In Zen stillness, determined not to interfere, I urge it on,

this corpus of the shadow or the self.

It comes within one human step of shelter.

I think, I hope that it will make it.

Then a grackle lands on the pavement.

Black as the bug itself it hops along

some invisible perimeter

six feet away. It stops, watching. The bug has stopped.

A minute feels like a decade passing. I feel

my breath in the suspense, and my breath is the breath

of everything that lives around and in me.

With one last bewildered bob of the head

the grackle flies away as though I willed it.

The beetle slips into its place of thorns and flowers.

My heart explodes with a quantity of joy

that seems to me both comically absurd

and insufficient for the moment

even as it burns with a magnitude of sorrow

too bright to look at,

too high and vast to measure.

CHRIS ELLERY is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body. He has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he teaches at Angelo State University.