The Cicada

The cicada's wings are dark, with yellow spots in rows. Beside it a beetle lies with its wing covers shut under brass pins.

You bring a finger toward the cicada, slowly. The head comes around to the finger. The wings, which were still, lift a little.

The man with the brush does not look up. Seventeen years in the ground, that one, he says, for a few weeks of singing. It goes in the ledger before the lamps are out, and I have not written it up.

The paper is thin enough that your breath would crease it. You breathe out through your nose, with your finger where it is. The wings settle, the left one a moment after the right.

Down the room a lamp goes out, and then the next. Past the dry windows, behind the hedge, the graveyard is still holding its one flat note.