Tad Tuleja

The Idea of Order in Our Back Yard
 
Edge of the porch, stone silent, a grasshopper rests.
Seen askance it seems less insect than insect
hunter: a beige diminutive frog. The legs, those
unlikely engines of explosion, are cocked 
along the thorax in the same taut chevron 
as a frog’s legs are tucked against its body. 

I’m not sure why I find it strange — Darwin 
wouldn’t — that this desiccated nibbler of greenery
should anticipate the limbs of its own predator.
Not sure either why our dog, whom you would not
suspect of coveting insects, pounces on them as 
deliriously as any amphibian. With haunches, 
one might observe, resembling frogs’ and hoppers’. 

There’s a hint here about the Great Chain of Being, 
or at least the long midsection between amoebas and angels. 
Eat or be eaten, goes the mantra of Hell, and I recall 
with some embarrassment I have eaten frogs. And
grasshoppers. Though not, so far as I know, 
any huskies or hounds.

Tad Tuleja is a New Jersey-bred, Texas-based folklorist who after many years as a nonfiction writer and university teacher returned in his seventies to a passion of his youth, lyric poetry. He has written pulp novels and literary spoofs, edited three scholarly anthologies on American vernacular traditions, and received a Puffin Foundation development grant for his war song cycle “Skein of Arms.”  He is currently preparing a collection of poems entitled Things of the Brilliant Earth, which aims (as Joseph Conrad said), “to make you see.”