Martin Walls

Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin, As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of titanium; They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern slowing into town. But all you ever see is the silence. Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves. With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space museum — What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory; The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk in the bottom of a mug. Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with lineman's pliers. A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry in Brighton.