Still Life with Paper Wasp Nest and Lava Flow, and: Adansonia digitata (Baobab)

Abstract

Still Life with Paper Wasp Nest and Lava Flow, and: Adansonia digitata (Baobab) Sandra Meek (bio) Still Life with Paper Wasp Nest and Lava Flow Paper chalice a wasp worries to the heart of the patio junk-sculpture dog’s metal pipe torso: Thurston’s lava tube in miniature, refuge the long night against which children are issued soft caps, weak flashlights embedded Cyclopsian at the third eye, hands free for the inevitable stumbling. A lost century’s souvenir seekers snapped that tunnel’s every last stalactite. Only feathery tree roots surviving discovery, dangling still from a ceiling buried beneath rainforest tree ferns swallowed by the near-petrified froth of a pāhoehoe flow glistening like wing feathers of starlings, younger by decades than the black-pearl handprints of oil a seventy-years-sunken battleship still snakes to a harbor’s monument-shadowed wake. The iridescent jag of lava I stole from that flow less to possess its dark gleam than to be free any moment to relive that moment’s possessing that beautifully cooled fire not someone else’s history. Whatever’s been pressed to our foreheads casts only the faintest echo of light to the nearest cave wall as a wash of strained gold weaker than oncoming headlights flashed from the eyes of a small wild creature you recognize but [End Page 40] can’t name: our father’s cigarette in the living room’s night kindling to a dying star the bourbon you’d know without seeing his other hand held. Childhood we’d like to remember as a distant reef of incandescent ash bubbled with air solely to recall flight as the luminous globes of whorled rainbows your own slight breath made rise from your fist’s plastic wand, not as what broke to blister the concrete steps you’d been banished to. That castle of spit and rain, could you see it from there, the nest’s temple lantern pressed not from rice but vanished leaves? One’s browning heart a wasp pierces even now, eating through to clouded sun— passage the mouth of a fresh cigarette burn, the caldera distanced by binoculars’ glass I awkwardly reversed: the day-pillar of smoke held to a wisp indistinguishable from steam rising from vents furred with spidery ferns shading to a deep emerald cluster of ‘ōhI‘a trees. Bruised eye of an ethereal circling: what memory reforms until there is no boundary between vapor’s rising and the low clouds’ descent. The narrative of steam, one story of family— whatever’s caught of the rain, the gashed earth aspires to return as that loss. Paper wasps driven to nest any near hollow. The architecture of home begins as simply chambered as origami fortune-tellers grade-school girls fashion from notebook-torn sheets folded and held to the seeker like unbudded nosegays: four penciled directions to believe [End Page 41] in horizon, one tucked beneath each paper flap, each hastily crafted cradle temporal as the thinnest bible paper, the tiniest umbrellas perching the sweet drinks we’ve grown to favor midlife—our father, elderly now, gingerly sipping wine beneath a courtyard bar’s spreading banyan tree, having long found God and lost his taste for whiskey. What best remember of that afternoon’s cooled flow? The braided lava’s silvered opalescence, or how you left him unsteady at the asphalt path’s end as we ventured out as we once would onto a lake’s pocked and pebbled ice to skate the most deeply scarred winter? That field of new stone a crust fragile as blown-glass Christmas tree ornaments, weightless as a drift of black wasp wings swept gleaming to this one last corner of his world; the void’s intricate weaving invisible from surface’s sheen, that shimmering breadth of pored stone: how it held you. How he waved, looking on. [End Page 42] Adansonia digitata (Baobab) Letaba Camp, Kruger National Park, South Africa Weightless as the heart that shelving driedto a fraction, your fruits’ chalky remainsare fanned with copper threads, frayed veinsdesiccated as those ponderedthrough decades of Elephant Hall glass to a glazedtissue of dust. Digitata, for the hand; digitigrade...