A centipede, waddling across one’s floor,
striped like fruit-stripe gum
with elegant tail wisps trailing behind—
perfected fluid
marching of leg after regimented
leg like the rippling
synchronicity of a pianist
practicing Czerny
exercises up and down the keyboard.
The giant holly-
hocks that begin the day like round, café-
au-lait bowls, with hand-
drawn lipstick-pink petals on the bottom
and warm, sticky-sweet
honeyed centers. They open themselves up
into dinner plates
by noon with a precisely engineered
choreography
of unfolding, the way collapsible
metal vegetable
steamers unfold themselves. A grasshopper
that flings itself up
out of a patch of clover in measured
cadences, with bright
flashes of marigold-yellow under-
wing, and a shower
of castanet-like clicking raining into
the air. A giant
hulk of a beetle, clinging to the string
of my porch light
like an overweight P. E. student
hanging on gym ropes, who then,
improbably, begins to maneuver
itself with clever
dexterous footwork upside down and right-
side up, then upside
down again—deftly plying the twirling
string with the practiced
muscular grace of a Cirque du Soleil
gymnast. The tiny
pale green nymphs that mistake my bedside lamp
for the moon, swirling
in clusters within the warm gold halo
of light, then pausing
to rest for a moment on the opened
pages of my book
like uneasily shifting hieroglyphs
that cast strange shadows,
causing me to misread things. And after all,
isn’t it really
just such a delicate smidgin of life
that separates love
from leave, fear from feat, spectacular
from testicular,
and grace from grief? How is it that starfish
are each perfected
in their architectural proportions
to form the ratio
of the Golden Section? Why do the leaves
of the artichoke
map the same, mathematical sequence
as pinecones, daisies,
seed heads, and cauliflower; and who tells
snails or the chambered
nautilus to initiate the in-
finite, spiraling
logarithms of the Fibonacci
series? How do bees
know which egg to select for their new queen,
nurse bees ladling
royal jelly over the larva once
she hatches, sealing
shut the royal chamber with wafers spun
from wax and silk? They
let her slumber for seven days before
she’s reawakened:
a lambent, ambered, incandescent bride
and queen, obsessed
by a hard-wired and fearless desire to throw
herself at the sun—
fierce and elusive in her skyward flight.
###
Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of four volumes of poetry: Dandarians (Milkweed, Editions, 2014), On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), and Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin, 1999). She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The current South Dakota State Poet Laureate, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
“Things That Are Filled with Grace” originally appeared in Diode, Fall 2008.