Late Autumnal, with Cockroach
By Erin Belieu
Morning thick with inscrutable dinge;
another season drained. I’m watching
the pest control man fill the rat bait
station, black attaché of poison hidden
in the hedge.
And while I pay a monthly
bill for him to do my killing, still
it seems miraculous, how much insists
on surviving, despite us. What grinds it
out. What hustles simply to continue.
Like this plumply enormous
roach, its carapace the molten brown of
topaz, tooled cannily to fold into a ceaseless
package: look at it now collapsing to fit exactly
between my deck’s wooden slats.
No matter what unspeakable
agents we devise for it to carry to its nest,
there comes a calm in knowing there will always
be an awful, inexorable more of something,
other than us, to crawl or slither, gnaw & be
gnawed; a peaceful certainty of moreness,
creeping through our filth to greet what’s
coming soon.
Unloved, ingenious creatures,
the few truly diligent, whom we can never
drive off or annihilate completely, this poem
remembers you, waiting in our unplugged
cracks & fuming sewers, seeing the relentless
engines you’ve willed yourselves to be, the valor
of your tidy & despised machinery.
