Word: moths
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...compound words: "broomhandle-killing/that squirrel, carstunned and lost" she writes in "Manhattan As A Second Language." Asides in poetry are always dangerous, but when Harris writes in the first person she deals successfully with complex, convoluted images without losing the thread of her poetry. In "The Coddling Moth," she successfully creates a complicated, sensual comparison between a man and a moth, follows the moth into an apple grove, and leaps to agricultural science, throwing in the sarcastic lines "Polson pussy/synthesized and bottled." Then she returns to the man the poem describes, without ever confusing her images. In another poem...
...midst of Baltimore's recently rejuvenated Inner Harbor--that city's version of Faneuil Hall--sits an outpost of youthful chicken slingers clad in the orange and black colors of Alex's little kingdom. Moored in the harbor's greenish-brown water in the moth-balled U.S.S. Constellation, cousin of Boson's Constitution, and a favorites among the hordes of tourists who swarm through the twin glass-enclosed pavilions every day in the slimmer. They gawk at the awkward old boat and munch on Alex's chicken...
...Moth Geraghty, assistant dean of admissions at Harvard Law School, said Thursday she approved of the changes in the test, adding that the new scoring scale, from 10 to 50 as opposed to the previous 200-800 scale, is "more realistic," and easier to evaluate for admissions officers...
Lately, subtler forms of warfare have been introduced, including sprays that contain Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a bacterium that kills various moth and butterfly larvae. It, too, should be applied early. Another new experimental spray spreads a virus that afflicts the gypsies with fatal wilt disease, so called because the dying caterpillar shrivels into a kind of inverted-V shape. More diabolical are traps scented with sex lures to attract male moths. Scientists have also been distributing different types of insects-wasps, flies, beetles-that prey on gypsy moths at various stages in their life cycle...
Despite all this lethal ingenuity, the only really good news from the bug battlefront is that most healthy trees can survive two or three onslaughts. Indeed, foresters like to point out that the moths often strengthen the woodland by eliminating sickly specimens. But such Darwinian reassurances are little comfort to suburbanites worried about a favorite elm or oak. By now, about all they can do is keep the tree as healthy as possible -faithful watering and feeding help -gather up and destroy every clutch of moth eggs in sight, and wait until next year. -By Frederic Golden. Reported by Anne...