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Note
on
Conjurer
The
Conjurer is one of my impresarios.
I’m also presenting the conjuring presenter.
This
showman Conjurer is Nature herself, displaying spiders and insects to
children, encouraging them to research these alien creatures, and to be
amused by them:
... A sooty spider
as
convulsive as a rabbit, fat
in
woozy derricks, drunk on cider
from
bluebottles sipped on the sly.
This
Conjurer aspect of Nature is in our human sense ‘evil’.
He, or It rather, presents children with such free variety and
beauty:
the
bot fly, gad fly, fritillaries,
the
drone, puss moth, the mottled umber,
the
dung fly, the hive and humble bees...
but
encourages imprisonment:
Here,
children, under cover, put this
in
your jail jar.
Above
all, this host of the party is gloating that the children themselves
will in turn become like insects:
Will
you hunch pale by your friend the moth?
With
what slack bowels? And in what jars?
Hypocritical
readers do abominable
things to wild creatures. Nature has it in for you.
Derricks: hoisting devices, here spider’s legs; jail
jar: killing bottle for collecting insects; bot-fly: fly
which lays parasitic larvae; gadfly: horse fly; fritillary:
a butterfly; drone: male bee; puss-moth: large moth with
fluffy body; mottled umber: moth with wingless female; dung
fly: yellow-brown fly which lays its eggs in dung; humble-bee:
bumble-bee.
Alan
Marshfield
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