In the Changing Light

Brimming the trees with song they flood July, spill over into August pulsing lovecries, cicadas here—one that our cat brought me lay, legs folded neatly, on clear wings as on a shroud, green and white, fizzing now and then, but when I threw it spread wings and zagged in a wide curve into the sweetgum tree where presently its dry buzzsaw whined for some significant other to auger down into dark dense earth and gnaw at the roots of things, sans eyes, sans wings, sans song for seventeen years or so. As daylight sharpens, deer slip back into the woods. I wonder what a deer, when danger grows too bright, makes of a world whose darker, truer memories in ear and nose must solve the dazzle of our alien eyes, more surgical at stripping off its cover, at masking selves as downwind leaves. I’ve read somewhere the claim, by computer people, that pain cannot be felt until self-consciousness has been achieved, and they had programmed in that level, so they said, of artificial pain. In A. R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist