Word: cicadas
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...subjects" are small, mute structures with no minds of their own--not animals or people but seedpods, spores, pollen, sprouts, twigs, pupae, the embryonic scribblings of cellular life learning to write its name. One painting, Insecta, 1985, is full of chrysalises, cockchafers and stag beetles, with a red cicada clinging to a scrubby patch of blue ground. Another, Pitch Lake, 1985, has an array of spore clusters creeping, with phallic intent, across a sticky-looking field of bitumen. Some of the images are quite recognizable (there are clams, for instance, and bean sprouts), while others have the sketchy look...
Scientists speculate that the periodic cicada's infrequent but abundant above-ground appearance is a survival strategy. Predators cannot thrive on a dinner that shows up so seldom, and the cicadas' sheer numbers guarantee that even though individuals are easy to catch, many will survive...
Some also claim that the cicada's peculiar, burning, raspy song, produced by a pair of ribbed membranes at the sides of the male's abdomen, is irritating to predators. That seems fanciful, but perhaps it is true because people are uncommonly cross about cicadas and complain that their song is nerve-racking. In Missouri, these days, it is constant and pervasive. The cicadas have three things to say. One is a steady, insistent, buzzy trill: zs-zs-zs-zs-zs. It is a background to a more varied kee-o-keeeee-o-kee-o that punctuates the steady drone...
...eaten by predators or squashed and dusted with poison by humans. But most survive, and the female is able to lay upwards of 500 eggs in slits that she makes in twigs. The lives of the adults are soon over, and they die. But in eight weeks the cicada nymphs hatch and burrow down into the ground to reach the tree roots, on which they will feed and grow slowly for the next 13 years. The periodic cicadas do not kill trees in their feeding, and at no point in their lives do they hurt garden vegetables or flowering plants...
Back in my woods where I am cutting the winter's firewood, the cicada's song fills my head, seems to reverberate inside it. Cicadas, the sun catching their wings and reflecting rainbows, line every tree trunk, every branch. One lights on my shoulder. His broad face with its big red eyes is inches from mine...