Tuesday Poem: Entymologist

To find it, you need to feel the trunk

with your fingers. It’s soft, a lump, mossy.

It is a door that you open with your tweezers. You

lean out over the gap between the track
and the tree, lean your cheek on the bark,
stare at the lump, insert the tweezers. Tug.

Your face is like a man in love.

Your mouth so soft

as if you are saying ‘bugger, bugger, bugger.’

It doesn’t struggle. Its many legs

hang like hair wet from a child’s mouth.

You slide it into the glass tube

you carry.

It is yours now. It leaves behind the

threads it lays to ambush

the unwary, it leaves behind its

soft lumpish home, it leaves behind

the trapdoor without a hinge

behind which it was wary, but not

wary enough, it leaves behind the remains

of the unwary.  

In the tube,

the spider appears legless. You show us

this -- you show us the trapdoor. It's
your first day out. We applaud you, young man,

fresh sweat on your face and new boots on. 

We applaud you; we

wave you on up the track. 

Then we take turns to lean out over the gully

and touch

the mossy door. 

                                 

                                    Mary McCallum

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I love the way writing about the work people do brings them alive in poems and fiction. I heard a lovely poem by Kate Duignan read recently (by Kate) about her as a child breaking eggs with her grandmother to bake a cake. It captures so well the intimacy of baking a cake together, the relationship between the two. It's wonderful. 

There's a book at the bookshop that I covet - it is a collection of stories by some great names including Andre Dubus and Alice Munro called blue collar, white collar, no collar - stories of work edited by Richard Ford. I always remember Munro's comment about writing characters - (did I read it or hear her say it at a writers' festival?) 'Give them work to do, we all work in one way or another'. 

Work, surely, is one of those things that animates a character on the page. Gives 'a reason for getting up in the morning'.  

While googling Ford's book, I found this interesting article about how he views the 'work' he does as a novelist. I wouldn't agree it's as easy as he makes out, but the article is interesting nonetheless. 

Do check out another insect poem on the Tuesday Poem  hub - it's called The Wild Bees and it's lush and intricate and by Irish poet, and former Tuesday Poet, John Griffin. The editor is the mysterious Zireaux, who always has something fascinating and controversial to say. This time it's about the need for a wider vocabulary in modern poetry.

After that, look at the sidebar of Tuesday Poets, always interesting stuff there.