I prop David Hinton’s Classical Chinese Poetry
against the wall beside the bed in the East bedroom;
observe –
from an advantageous position
high up on my body –
my arms & hands lifting & placing,
flawlessly,
like an industrial robot
at Volvo Cars in Gothenburg;

realize
that I am the tiny unmanned insect
with neither epithet nor species designation,
moving jerkily,
utterly sudden in the field of vision,
from absolute immobility to panic-stricken scurrying,
down at the bottom of visibility;
my eyebrows grown out into feelers,
into lashing antennae;
my jaws grinding mandibles,
feared capture devices, mechanical gripping tongs,
in an indeterminate place in the universe,
up & down through cracks & notches
in a moss-covered spruce stump
in an old-growth forest
where the most recent logging took place in 1878

I observe
how I quickly scuttle out of my gaze
into the undergrowth,
my mandibles grinding froth
while my Tretorn Sarek boots
stand like two gigantic tanker trucks
at a burning refinery in Bashkortostan

The underworld reeks of oil & methane,
and I unexpectedly run into Orpheus,
on his way back up to the surface;
Eurydice left down there,
among mammoths & woolly rhinoceroses