Poems by Nathan Manley

Fragment on Natural Philosophy

by Nathan Manley

From Canary Summer 2020

Residing for now among the mixed deciduous forests of the Merrimack River watershed, Manley pines for the arid landscapes of the West—for cottonwoods and peachleaf willows, Platte-nourished; for pronghorn and prairie grass; for the great backbone of the Rockies, crowned at intervals with Precambrian rock half as old as life itself.

<...>
and we christened it the vivarium:
an enclosure we cobbled from scrap wood
and screen wire. In a spell of listlessness
such as only torrid Summer produces
in schoolchildren, we designed the capture
of the orb-weaver whose gossamer lair
hung glistening and taut beneath the porch.

<...>
<...> rustle of heat <...>
we conspired <...>
chittering grass and the scent of blown silt
<...>
<...> infecting our [play], the microscope’s
<...> tenacity and [violence]
<...>

We cupped grasshoppers in our naked hands,
wherein the tickle of their singing limbs
excited mirth and laughter. With the air
of a technician, one of us then grasped
the hind leg of an insect, peeled, wrenched it
backward and off—force for which the creature
offered no greater censure than a twitch.
Quietly, the question of cruelty

stretched like a net between us, sunk into
a taxonomic slump; in the clear lymph
that pooled about the oozing wound, we probed
questions of blood, and we ordained, at length,
a fate for our newly hobbled captive.
We crept below the deck, paused, and cast him,
flailing, into the spider’s web—bright nerves:
a system inflamed with [motion] <...>

Teased from its hidden rest among the boards,
the weaver, with all the alacrity
of an electric signal, leapt across
the quaking strands of silk which stuck and seemed
to sting <...>
<...> a [struggle]
and a silent husk. We secured the beast
in the distraction of its frenzied glee

and confined it behind walls of wire mesh
in the vivarium. There we kept it,
catalogued with crickets <...>
in my father’s garage, perhaps a week,
perhaps <...>
<...> if memory fails,
<...> was it left like [knowledge]
<...> ‘til now to hunger in the dark?