RICH IVES - INSECTGROUP

Rich Ives has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Thin Air Creative Nonfiction Award. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press--poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books--stories) and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press--hybrid).

​Someplace Nearby Called Here
 

Gray Metalmark Butterfly
​

Walter wanders. Walter wants honey mesquite and eggs flattened with light green, dotted with ridged hexagons, followed by a gray-green chrysalis with straw-colored wing cases two or three times each year in the semi-arid desert mountains of southeast California and east through Arizona and New Mexico to west Texas and south to Baja California and central Mexico. Walter wants slinkers and arching in silken hideaways between sewn mesquite leaflets, emerging during winter for brief feedings in a faded blue-green with lemon-yellow stripes and a line of short tufts of white hair.
 
Walter is above himself. Walter is a dusky brown-gray, flushed with orange and slightly dappled with white. Some other Walters have orange margins and white fringes, bottoms pale peach with extensive white overlays and scalloping and wavy light brown line cuts across their middle offerings, but not this Walter.
 
The cloak of daylight slowly flung itself aside beside Walter, and there was the leaning away of caution, tired of pretending it could go on forever, like a straw hat that might have been only part of the complaint.
 
We tried to ignore the evening’s gentle stampede.
 
Too many complacencies at the edge of deviation.
 
Grief that fell off the wall and attached itself.
 
We get off the bus, but we’re not there yet.
 
Finally we’ve arrived at the wrong world, and the bluster of a useless thought rushes through me, naught but a sliver of grace between fear and condescension.
 
Grandfathers of industry and their blind oxen deliver the heavy, the unattached, as if they were parts and not the end of speculation. Held down by the weight of a fly, your attentions won’t rise to meet Walter, but you know he’s still there.
 
Damp stones in the pockets of yesterday.
 
 

​Someone to Rub Against

Great Arctic Butterfly
​

​Oddly enough, the Gordon riots restrained themselves to the grassy verges of forest openings and foothills, the outer margins recording themselves scalloped upon the advancement registers, Gordons turning orange-brown and darker on the outer borders, with two or three eyespots each on the forward reaches and one on the hind, the males exhibiting darker patches from their base and on toward the foreshaft, their undersides stippled brown and white with curved transverse bands and a prominent pale gray patch at the leading edge.
 
Offloaded Gordon eggs stuck to the blades of grass or nearby structures close to the ground, eventually hatched green, turning to a pale brown with longitudinal stripes, upon the completion of which feat they would hibernate two winters.
 
Inexplicably, the adults synchronized to fly together in even-numbered years but were awarded no further miles for such credits and developed their own services further, leaning towards the less formal but no less unified patterns of the northern regions.
 
A Gordon glass of poured stars half full came to be known as a Shiver, a Gordon mistake as a mere indulgence.
 
I was not the first to notice.
 
I could have been approaching the sublime, but the cornered prey included your celebrations, and I have thus far been unable to deny a party.
 
 
 

​Another Blue Egg Hovers and Turns

 Great Basin Sootywing Butterfly
​

​I had to gather Kemp from ditches and flowers. I believe now that I was lucky that some of him got away. The collection demonstrated a brassy-black to dark brown surface with crescents of white spots on the directional route, smaller on the male aspects, brown to brownish-gold below,  with spots only at the tip. A basal spot appeared upon Kemp’s great basin and seemed to be growing. Eggs were supplied with an issuing partner and appeared pale orange to cream-colored although the emergent’s were robin’s egg blue with black dots along their sides with white bristles and black heads with reddish fur. The emergent’s were subsequently observed to be stubby, curved, and tan, with black wing pads, feeding upon saltbush along the edges of the alkaline sage flats and desserts of the west and southwest.
 
The later worship of light feces, particularly the floating varities, was not originally part of Kemp’s plan though Kemp was equally unclear about what was part of his plan, which angered him. His anger was a metaphorical water boy, and he raised him from a bucket to a truck, where he leaked, and the whole world exploded with an immediate and gentle rain.
 
As a researcher, I find my caged objectives plucking their water’s surface don’t have as much silence in them as I expected. My girlfriend at the time, a beautiful turtle of patience, didn’t understand Kemp though other subjects engaged her with a kind of intimate squall and that darkness was delicious. Our dwelling seemed to be lifted by her frenzies of participatory interplay.
 
To this day, I have continued to honor her absence, voluntary, not accidental or persuaded, by living in a house made of water, which likewise continues the attractions of Kemp, upon which, however, neither he nor his progeny actually land. In this way I am allowed to experience Kemp’s presence at the edges of my activities without questioning the impressions a woman can provide while illuminating the true nature of “landing”.
 
 
 
 

​Drinking the Possible Without Swallowing
 

Great Basin Wood Nymph Butterfly
​

​Hugh huffs and splices. Hugh malingers. Hugh has a kind of vibrant squeegee relative assimilation of his host plants, particularly the durable grasses of the grassland prairies. From above, where the light lurks, Hugh is grayish brown, with two dark eye spots, with pale pupils encircled by black and yellow rings forward and from below, a gray-brown with fine striations. From behind, he appears frosted with white scales.
 
Nectar of Rabbit-brush is Hugh’s favorite celebration dinner, but he doesn’t really know what he’s celebrating in the now relaxed lighting, as if the prairie were a single vast room descending.
 
And the vast room alters and suggests the house and the house suggests the neighbor’s house and the neighbor’s house the not-yet-known adventure of the world and the world the unimaginable, that tickles and turns and refuses to hold still.
 
Hugh huffs again and slides slowly to sleep, imagining himself huge and thickly fluid, like a giant bag of darkness spilled upon the vast gray prairie floor that once sprouted green, warming up the approaching festivities which have become his life and passed him by. Now we must bend down and hunker beneath the bowed blades of inevitability, tented over with a generous snow that houses our patience, our endurance, and hardens there until the stage sets itself for another familiar scene of arousal, which is still cautiously ours though we know it intimately no longer.
 
 
 
 

​Each Samuel
 

​Great Copper Butterfly
 

​Each Samuel is a man I knew when he was younger, each a lover of the same female replicating herself, for the stories were about the men I was looking at and not the women they were in turn ready to tell stories about. Each Samuel was, however, admiring the gray-brown female, streaked with dull orange with further orange crescents visible from behind, where I always stood as they were admired by the Samuels, whose own undersides were a pale buff with black-rimmed brown spots and the same orange crescents.
 
The Samuels were eating, mostly Dock, and they seemed satisfied to admire without approaching the female. Did they do this with all females or only this one? Were they shyly in love, or arrogantly indifferent? You might think these responses incompatible, but I can assure you they are not.
 
I listened to the story of each Samuel until I felt I knew him and could reside, at least temporarily, inside him. This made me feel very conflicted, despite the similarity of the Samuels. I realized in each case how well I must have known them.
 
I lived in this manner for many years. I remember very little of anything else I accomplished. I too did not approach the female. Or did we all approach her? Had we forgotten what we had done? All of us? It seems silly to consider, but why did I feel so satisfied?
 
And then one day the Samuels all appeared at once, and I stood there, speechless with my mouth open as they admired the same female without approaching her. I must have had my mouth open, for a fly landed there, and I spit him out violently, which left me hungry, only Dock to eat, which I did in respect to the Samuels. I went deeply into my previous thoughts of each Samuel and returned as if from a long journey only to discover that each Samuel had put on a different piece of the female’s discarded clothing. I did not understand how they could all fit. I could not be as naked as that. Nor could I be as naked as she was.