It Doesn’t Get Better than This
It’s become my mother’s morning ritual
to sit and watch the clouds as they scud across
the Continental Divide in a billow she says
could pass for heaven because it’s far enough away.
Yesterday, when she set her cup down on the railing
the tiny oval of a face rose to meet her own, its eyes
no bigger than pinpoints: one 60-year-old female, genus
of the anxious educated, the other a flatheaded borer beetle
two creatures driven by biological need;
My family’s matriarch to control the future just
enough to ensure her children’s success; her companion’s,
to stitch a curve of writhing mucus-colored clots.
Can that bug be as attached to its spawn as my mother
is to hers? Will this two-inch insect be proud of the tunnels
its offspring will sew, the frass they will cast until
that aspen my parents think we own is beyond saving
these are the things my mother worries about
as the beetle disappears over the railing, twenty feet
straight down, a descent no human could attempt.
• • •
Born in Washington D.C. and raised on a barrier island in New Jersey, Elizabeth Smith’s work engages the natural world through observation, empathy and humor. She has been a featured poet in Tigers Eye Journal, has one Pushcart nomination and received the New Jersey Poet’s Prize for 2022 for her poem “Callinectes Sapidus.” She lives in Nederland, Colorado.