~
A Water Boatman the Size of a Peppercorn
Uses its Penis as a Fiddle to Attract a Mate
It’s hard to conceive of your own single-celled beginning
let alone to go further back, when all life was infinitesimal
in that deep time of the world’s womb, when everything
alive was just one cell in the vast placental sea, primeval
ocean, slop-bucket of protons. It’s also beyond your
scope to consider the colossal force; that will to power
you call evolution that waited billions of years to
divide the ghost-thin cellular walls into halves.
More potent than anything known, or yet unknown.
Denser than hydrogen that a star will suck through
its gravity-fed straw when it needs to fuel up on helium.
More pumped than neutrinos that spiderweb galaxies
with silk-strong quasars to the power of ten, twenty
that will break down the bodies of planets like spider
venom on an internal organ. A piece of a neutron star
dime-sized would core the earth cleanly like an apple.
Arthropods were constructed first like Lego robots,
building blocks of amino acids that clicked into place.
Multi-cellular walls connected like chains of frogspawn.
Nature is a canny beast, throws up insects that have tricks.
Some shoot their foes with acid; alien strategies to survive.
Some use voodoo to micro-manage ladybird zombies.
Some imitate a leaf, plagiarising patterns of trees, bark,
anything living to create a ghillie suit. Remember that book
you read where those white moths changed to grey after
the smog of the industrial revolution set a new spectrum.
Adapt or die the baseball cap says. They were sick of being
picked off by gunmen & changed into hitman overcoats.
Then there’s a water boatman the size of a peppercorn
that uses its penis as a fiddle to attract a mate. When
you say fiddle, you mean its abdomen as its instrument,
its penis the bow. You want to use the word chitinous
to describe their manufacture. You’d think that with
ponds the frogs, crickets & cicadas would drown out
every other creature with their rock concert. But this
French pond-skipper is a soloist; a Gainsborough of
the undergrowth who rubs his member across his own
stomach in a crescendo of sonic self-flagellation. You
imagine a sound like a musical saw piercing through
the bulrushes’ protective screen, a note a tank makes
when it shreds its tracks or a train’s derailment. Iron
bent backwards like a tortured wrist. You’d also believe
that his mate would have ears as sensitive as a giant
radio telescope, Arecibo perhaps, crater-sized to pick
out his serenade amongst all the cosmic interference;
bullfrogs with their speaker-stack throats blasting full-
bore, cicadas celebrating their years in the underground
& crickets striking match-stick legs to spark romance.
The boatman’s penis-bow perhaps being the equivalent
of a bone-flute or skull candle-holder; that Italian church
where you saw the monks go mad for human bone-art;
turning femurs into angels’ wing struts, phalanges into
feathers. Even you started small. In your confirmation
photo you’re a head shorter than the other boys, even
the girls. That’s why you didn’t get anywhere with Anne
who you met on the forest track at confirmation camp;
her stripy sweater woven with dead leaves, the pastor’s
son casting a tall shadow over her like a eucalypt’s trunk.
You’ve never had an ear like the female water boatman,
for music, or language, or even sex. In primary school
you murdered the recorder, threw your snail under
the table at the French feast & were dropped by note.
But it could be worse. You could be a single-celled
organism safe with your slime king. Or be an insect.
You could have an eye on the end of your penis
like some bugs do, or your member & testicles might
explode after sex, killing you with a little death.
This is all true. The Swedes have researched it.
~
B. R. Dionysius b 1969 in Dalby, Queensland, Australia. (He/him/his) has since lived in Melbourne, Ipswich and Brisbane where he is an English teacher, was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival and in his spare time watches birds. He has recently published work in ACC Progenitor Journal, Blue Earth Review, ginosko literary journal, Juste Milieu Literary Review, October Hill Magazine, Remington Review, Sobotka Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, The Mystic Blue Review, The Electric Rail, The Cold Mountain Review and was short-listed in the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
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