Annemarie Austin
On Wednesdays
The coleopterist has quite forgotten his daughter,
opens the door into the study full of cabinets
full of beetles as he does for every stranger.
With the wrong glasses for reading the labels
he is all at sea. Even the stag beetle, heavy
as a paperweight, is an anonymous thing.
She tries to remind him of that June the house
was veritably beset by horned brown creatures,
how daily for a fortnight the cat would bring them in,
roll on them and leave them puzzled for a moment.
It is coming back to me, he says, although
the rest of the conversation witnesses against him.
He multiplies his children by geometric progression
while treating her politely as a visitor to tea.
But when she was a little girl he told her
about Haldane, who believed that on acquaintance
God must turn out to be a female stag beetle.
Page(s) 62
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