Bug Hat

June 17 2015

In black-fly season

I am an astronaut,

clamped

into a stiff pneumatic suit

hermetically sealed.

Breathing stale air

and where a tiny tear

is instant death.

I look out at the world

behind the veil’s fine mesh

as if through plexiglass,

a mosquito net

crawling with bugs.

Feel constrained, somehow, not quite there;

an anthropologist, in his blind

taking notes.

Its supple folds

shimmer in the breeze,

catch the sun

blinding me.

I feel claustrophobic

as if depleting my air,

acutely aware

and taking meticulous care

of its gossamer mesh.

As if I had ventured out

into an alien world,

too warm-blooded, soft-skinned

to survive.

But they, too, will die,

mostly fruitless lives

that end without a bite.

And by the end of July

the hot dry air will be still,

the buzz-saw of bugs

quieted.

I duck into the house, relieved;

as if an air-lock had hissed

and I was free to breathe.

Unmasked;

as if in the muzzled light

of drawn blinds, and tinted glass

I could clearly see.

I never quite get used to this bug hat. It seems to come between me and the world: I don't see clearly; it's as if I can't breathe. And it's a lot of fuss going in and out. So it's such a relief when the season ends.

But more to the point, this is another poem that casts man as an intruder: a creature who doesn't quite belong, and isn't welcome, in the natural world. It's not just the idea of an alien, or of an astronaut on life support. It's the sense that there is always something intermediating between us and the world. We never quite see clearly, even though we think we do: whether it's the anthropologist in his blind; or whether it's peering out from behind tinted glass or through a fine mesh mask. Who would have thought that the crux of the poem might turn on the rather unpoetic as if -- read with a slightly ironic sneer – repeated in the final stanza.

I rather like muzzled (which, in the first iteration of the poem, was "filtered"). It plays nicely off buzz and bug and duck. But more interestingly, it's a word from the realm of sound applied to vision. In so doing, it acts a kind of bridge between the buzz-saw of the preceding stanza and the subdued interior of the last: the exterior world full of life; the interior one sterile.

(Naturally, I've taken the usual poetic license here. Only the black-flies are gone by July. There are still plenty of mosquitoes and deer flies and other nasties. Not to mention that there is often another hatch of black-flies sometime in September.)