Timothy Pond and I, Distracted/Invaded/Educated by the Inchworm — By Wren Tuatha
Field of Red by Lori Fuller
There’s an ice cube on the door mat. Timothy Pond knows its story but that’s not interesting. Look here, she points, through the window above the kitchen sink. An inchworm has been charting this section of leaves all morning. What is this bush called? I never think to ask or look it up. Colored glass with Kokopelli…I’ll have to put looking up that bush on a list. That’s how things get done. The sound of a flute or children discussing the rules of a game. Can the inchworm hear? The thing that trips me up about lists is that you have to read them. Dried drips on a blender and soapy water splatter pattern. It’s a crime no one cleans up in here…
Timothy Pond googles inchworms. She writes herself a note to ask the landlord the name of that bush with the wide leaves. That’s the difference between us; Timothy Pond is a doer, or at least a list-reader.
Inchworms are the larvae of various geometer moths. Fractal papyrus wings and colors pressed in symmetry. Geometers, Earth measurers, named for their busy caterpillar children.
To name a thing
is to have
great power
over how
it is perceived.
Recently a science class also wanted to know if caterpillars could hear. Testing different frequencies with a sound generator, they identified “a narrow band of frequencies that agitated the caterpillars quite a bit…” (1) low in the range. They researched what natural sounds vibrate at those frequencies—The flapping of birds’ wings. (The adult wax moth can hear the highest known frequency. The better to avoid a bat’s radar…) To confirm their theory, the science students shaved little hairs off their caterpillars until they no longer reacted to the sounds.
While I stare out a sky-filled corner of her window, picturing that science teacher being abducted by aliens who pluck his pubic hairs and nipple hairs and butt hairs until he no longer hears himself offering to buy a stranger a drink, Timothy Pond daydreams she’s the alien.
Timothy Pond’s aunt’s kitchen window bush inchworm was much larger than this specimen. Or maybe she was smaller then, or the window or bush was. Geometry and horizons. Peach scented candles her aunt never lit. When Timothy Pond was a larva watching, a fat wren landed, did math, and ate that inchworm. A bowl of meaning and an utter lack of meaning. Timothy Pond’s aunt was rarely home.
1. https://bryangregorylewis.blogspot.com/2010/06/can-caterpillars-hear.html
Wren Tuatha is a queer, disabled poet and hybrid writer who earned her MFA at Goddard College. Her first collection is Thistle and Brilliant (FLP). She’s appeared in Slipstream, Pirene's Fountain, Seneca Review, Inverted Syntax, Hunger Mountain, NonBinary Review, About place Journal, and others. She's formerly Artist-in-Residence at Heathcote Center. Wren and partner author/activist C.T. Butler herd goats among the Finger Lakes of New York, where she is director of Ithaca Poetry Center.