Last Song
Marian Halls
Time caught me one day when I was going about business. Time caught me on a way between the cold burrows of earth and the wide reach of stars. I was no longer hands and feet, elbows and legs. When others spoke to me, I no longer knew what they were saying. I was caught up by the movements of the heavenly bodies. I was pulled downward into the anticipation of what was about to happen. I shed my clothing and my mannerisms. I went subterranean. All that was left was to wait. Time moved as I waited: it was no longer I who was moving. I waited. It was dark. And from beneath the ground that was beneath me, I felt them. I felt their silent patience as they moved a thousand fold below me in the ground, stretching the sky across my face.
It begins with the damn buzzing. So loud, everything shakes. It is not a sound that human ears can comprehend, so I walk outside my house to see. I look for the cicadas. I can feel the presence of something shifting in the vibration of the air. It pushes into my ear and causes my drums to buzz. The buzzing makes my head quake, and the quaking causes a violent tremor in my eyes, until the insistent vibrating of my eyes makes it impossible to see. When my eye can no longer see, is when I begin to hear their song.
The face of the universe is a deep, saturated blue-black, and to see it, lie down still and listen, maybe through a nose. The earth-insects hear it as they smell, by the scent the blossoms on the trees send downward through their roots in slow recurrence for seventeen rotations of the earth. Deep in the earth of the earth, these creatures wait for seventeen years. When the tone of the flowers has soured for the last time, the earth-insects assume a new cadence, their defining role. They emerge from the ground to extend toward the stars, to sing, to become song, to love, and then to die.
In a short series of days, without speaking to each other or determining ahead of time that they will do so, the cicada nymphs move from their clandestine homes. They break ground and move upward, they make a start, again, at the surface. They follow the paths of anything that moves up – tender stems of creeping vines, rigid trunks of ancient trees, smooth surface of rocks. For them, the stars are up, and toward them they move, all of them together but not in tandem, in their own orbits and at their own rhythm, the way the constellations move through the blankness of space.
I feel the cicadas, their careful patience, as they move a thousand fold across me from the ground, stretching the sky across my face. The cicadas lay flat against surfaces and move up. As they begin to emit the sound that destroys the ears and the eyes of a human, they feel.
We only ever kept time when we were underground. We fed ourselves by sucking the juices of plant roots. The roots were soft and giving, becoming part of our own bodies. Underground we didn’t need to see. We felt the way the trees kept time above by their blossoms. We felt it by the way that time would carry through the trees’ coarse bark, through the thick rope roots, through the dark dirt, through our viscous skin. Below, to see is to feel, is to have the object of vision move up against the skin, and by the rhythm with which these objects approach us to know the movements of things not in our purview.
We don’t need to speak, and if in our innocence we move toward the excess of becoming reclusive, it is only so that by becoming reclusive we might more absolutely love. There is no speaking nor singing between cicadas for seventeen years. The things we hear and with which we communicate have nothing to do with our kind – only other members of the universe like trees, roots, stars, dirt, whose songs we can earnestly receive though not reciprocate. There is no speaking between cicadas for seventeen years. Still somehow, we emerge on the planet in some kind of a community, within a matter of days or hours. When we come, we have only one song, only we recognize, and it is loud! Loud not just in decibels, loud in tone, because it, and the movement our bodies make with the song, is the last song we sing as earth-insects. Our last and only song! Nobody taught it to us. We gathered the tones of everything the planet gave around us, seventeen years of rhythms and textures and qualities, and condensed it into one strident cry. Well and now I feel I am vibrating into disappearance in the cry of the cicada.
It’s always dark now. Not cold, but bent in toward me, with everything close. Now where has the sun gone? I am feeling all things through my eyes now, like near and far no longer exist. All things tumble against me as my body moves round, like they’re giving themselves to me in their dumb, affectionate blankness.
The only thing my skin picks up is this cool grass, this blanket. I widen my soft mass, horizontal. Love is a sound of something encountered with another body, the space between two sounds as we buzz. It can be smooth or strident, and it is impossible to know ahead of time what it is that the sound will destroy. No memory now for a time when there was something to look at, when stars were a thing on another side. Now drawn out taut along a level plane of earth we peel a mask onto our face, cool and inky – the sky. The “stars” are holes in the mask through which it might be tiny possible to see.
