V E R S E and I M A G E

[with poems by Lesley Wheeler and Bill Griffin]

How? Crayfish taste with their skin. Well, not skin precisely: cuticle is what their carapace is called, their shell, made of chitin. (Read to the end for a science geek discussion of chitin vs. keratin.) It’s hard and it’s tough but it has chemoreceptors that detect dissolved molecules. With their skin, crayfish taste the water. Or smell it.

Taste and smell, inseparable as yeast and flour. Apart only mildly interesting, but mix them together and suddenly it’s 1979, Durham, that little red house on Green Street, waiting at the table with your toddler for hot bread from the oven. Or if you’re Crayfish maybe a tasty caddisfly larva. Or perhaps that taste/smell is Otter on the prowl and it’s time to find a rock.

This big guy (guy: we have our ways of knowing these things, though we don’t like to pry when those pincers are cocked) is possibly an Upland Burrowing Crayfish, Cambarus dubius. Yes, he really is blue; I swear I didn’t touch the hue sliders. (Read to the end for a science geek discussion of crustacean blueness). He was tooling across the level patch near the creek below our house where the Sewer Authority crews clear a path to check their access ports. Lovely spot for a walk, although you might catch the occasional whiff of fabric softener lightly swirled with hydrogen sulfide and anaerobic bacteria. Poop perfume.

Ah, ineffable links, scent and memory. Strolling down the aisle at Food Lion I pass the Downy and my olfactory bulb & hippocampus spark to tell me I’m hiking beside the autumn creek. And look! A Crayfish!

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I don’t believe I’ve missed reading an issue of Cave Wall since its inception. Editors Rhett Iseman Trull and Jeff Trull never fail to craft a collection that sparks neurons I’ve been neglecting. In the same way that a forgotten aroma can open a memory door into all the senses, a poem can flash and growl and shudder the reader with sudden insight. Circles, ripples, connections. My college English prof taught a whole semester on it: epiphany. Or an even better word (thank you Caren Stuart for this indispensable addition to the lexicon) – the gasp-sigh.

Invocation by Lesley Wheeler appears in Cave Wall Number 16 (Spring 2020). Something here is thirsty . . . something is called to wake up! How much of each of us is mud, condensation? Shall we pause a moment for spore and mire to convene again within us?

Worship begins with invocation, a call to the divine presence to enter this place. But since divine mystery comprises the entire universe, every boson and lepton, where can we sojourn where the divine is not? Perhaps practicing invocation we are really calling ourselves. Enter this moment. Reside here. Abide with the mystery. Wake up!

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Invocation

Bottomland: rouse. Sedge, knotweed:
time to rally. You’ve been lost
in thought, ebb and fuming flood,
since the glacier, thin winters
digging for turtles in cold mud.
Valley was tundra. Elk and moose
drank at water’s brink while firs
invented shade. Panthers melted

into the dark, but spore and mire could
convene again. Softness feed us
and eat our footholds away. Something
here is thirst for living’s every
rivulet, hospitable and
treacherous in her oblivion.
Misty divots. Condensation
beads on the throat, where pulses drum.

What kind of god is this? Her name
just a hieroglyph drawn in muck
by a tentative finger. No
answer but a hissing river.
Drowsy spirit, I’m pleading. Take
this blood shed unseasonably,
mineral gift. Be comfort. Be
danger. Of sleep, of trough. Wake up.

Lesley Wheeler, in Cave Wall Number 16, Spring 2020

Lesley Wheeler is a poet, novelist, scholar, and blogger. She is the poetry editor of Shenandoah.

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The following poem appears in Snake Den Ridge: a Bestiary (2008, March Street Press). Linda and I collaborated on the book and her illustration appears below (at the time she agreed to interrupt her many other projects because I promised to dedicate the book to my friend Mike Barnett – I can’t even calculate the hours she spent drawing or the height of the field guides and science books piled beside her on her desk).

Crayfish

Just wiggle this rock
and the stream
hums a whole new flavor –
in the turbulence I taste
last night’s shower
on the Ridge
and this morning’s stirring
of awakened larvae.
Tailflap, legtips,
cuticle,
all of me every moment
strummed by roil and eddy,
random caress
of molecules,
divine order of chaos.

I’ll tell you a secret –
God is deliciousness!,

the constant inconstancy
of current
that reveals my breakfast
or Otter on the prowl,
and just maybe
the passing of a lovely
arthropod I long to meet.

Join me! Immerse yourself,
not in Inadu Creek
but in your own lifestream.
Savor it, sense it as I do
in every part of you.

Bill Griffin, in Snake Den Ridge: a Bestiary (2008, March Street Press)

Illustrations by Linda French Griffin.

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Chitin is the hard part of invertebrates: cicada exoskeleton, crayfish and lobster shell, squid beaks (and vertebrate fish scales). Keratin is the hard outer part of vertebrates: bird feathers, tiger claws, what little hair I have left. The two are chemically completely different but function in the same way, for protection and structure.

Chitin is a polymer of sugars, glucose with added nitrogen = glucosamine (a polysaccharide), the stuff I take for my bad knee. Keratin is a polymer of amino acids, namely a protein (polypeptide). Here are two more factoids you can’t possibly live without: Keratin resists digestion, which is why cats hark up hairballs. Spider silk is classified as keratin, although production of the protein probably evolved independently of the process in vertebrates.

Crustacyanin is not a Spongebob character. It’s what makes this crayfish blue. Crustacyanin is a carotenoid, which are pigment proteins found in everything from tomatoes to pink flamingos. The crustacyanin is made from stacks of another carotenoid protein (astaxanthin), which itself is red, but depending how many and how it’s stacked can actually reflect the blue portion of the spectrum. Blue crayfish (also look up Blue Lobsters) have a genetic variation in their stacking. If you steam them (perish the thought!!!) the astaxanthin comes unstacked and that’s why cooked crabs, lobsters, and crayfish are bright red.

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