Diane Lockward
What He Doesn’t Know
This is the season of the centipede. Concealed by night, he crawls across the ceiling, here to terrify but not to harm. How easily he travels at breakneck speed, up the drains and down the walls. Each of his one hundred legs securely clings, each foot so soft and light he sounds no alarm. On his head he bears a pair of jointed feelers and two sets of jaws. His body’s many-segmented and long, yet among the excess of legs, not one arm. The foremost pair of legs behind his head— two poison claws, once legs, then evolved to fangs, though he’s oblivious to the bite of Time. He has no philosophy, obeys no creed, needs only pipes in which he trawls undetected, moved by metal’s ping and an instinctual compulsion to roam. When hunger compels him to feed, he extends his predacious mandibles and silently captures his victim, swiftly killing with a lethal injection of venom. This creature breeds without reason or romance, no heart calls, no courtship dance, just sex without feeling, no need to love, no desire stoked to flame. Lucky little arthropod, without our human flaws. He has no poetry, no art, no songs, but knows no fear when darkness enters a room.
Diane Lockward’s second collection, What Feeds Us, received the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. A third collection, Temptation by Water, will appear in 2010. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac.
