The Crickets Are Loud Tonight
Aug 30 2008

The Chinese keep crickets
in tiny cages
inside.
How such small creatures
fill so much space.
How a single note, a steady pace
can make his house
a haven.


The crickets are loud tonight.
A comforting sound,
so much more than silence.
They chorus, then unaccountably stop
all at once.
A collective breath.
Or some sudden threat, perhaps.

And everything feeds on crickets, it seems.
But they keep-on chirping, nevertheless,
compelled to proclaim themselves
to an indifferent world.
Risking death
to preen for attention,
vie for sex.

Crickets making crickets,
to adorn this earth
with gentle hypnotic sound.
To console me in this private space;
submerged in such deep silence
a solitary man might drown.




This is what happens when you sit down to write, in an empty house, in absolute silence, far out in the country: the crickets are deafening! And with no particular ideas, and the stern internal reprimand that you absolutely will NOT write a lame lyric poem about crickets, what else can you do …but write a lame lyric poem about crickets!!
And a small departure – stylistically, anyway. I wrote the main body of the poem first. But I felt the contemplative setting of (what ended up becoming) the opening stanza would add something essential. There is a rarefied spirituality to this image of the Chinese keeping crickets. And since it really stands quite apart, I decided to keep it as a separate sub-title, or prologue. In the end, I think the mood it creates acts as a nice scaffold for the rest of the poem.