Gall

Catbirds clawing at the ruby drupes of viburnum, and bouncing the boughs as the great heat squats over us and crickets sandpaper sunlight in We are not lost. We're just quiet. If we don't speak, it's not that we have nothing to say. But that the owl has said it for us in his raspy whistle, perched twenty feet away on a log fallen over the brook, professorial, examining the trickle amid stones. Then suddenly he drops and seizes—what? a salamander? in his beak. And gulps it down. A smacking, cracking sound, after which he fastidiously wipes his mouth on the trunk. Still more ingenious, the wasp who drills the oak leaf to lay her eggs, injecting poisons that swell the leaf into a gall, a globed papyrus palazzo in which the commandeered tree generates a cafeteria so the larvae can feed until with sprouted wings and feet, lo, they chew their way out and take flight. They leave this tea-colored paper lantern ball Pliny the Elder instructed us to crush and boil with iron sulfate to make the oak gall ink Europeans wrote with for almost two thousand years. We are not lost. We have been writing. Out of our silence, our bile. Our chafing. Galled. The larvae were hungry. So was the owl. And we, from disease, made a codex of hungers and shaped the letters precisely, so they would last.