Invasive
“Experts suspect the first lanternflies arrived in the United States
in 2014 in Berks County, PA, aboard a shipment of stone from
their native China.”
—Bay Journal
The spotted lanternfly’s
Red hind wings
Red-flag the infestation
And no mechanisms
Like native wasps
To hold it in check.
Lycorma delicatula.
The thin dark wicks
Of the antennae.
The “brick and mortar”
Patterning the tips
Of the wings.
That beauty such as this
Should be found
In destruction’s toolkit—
What are we to think
About that?
Delicate little lanterns
And no tree of heaven
For them to abide in.
Diptych (I)
i.
Christopher Columbus Monument,
Schenley Park, Pittsburgh
Within the makeshift grid of scaffolding
The cast-bronze figure still puts on airs,
pitched
As if on a quarterdeck, riding
The crest of the concrete plinth.
Below him, scrawled across the scrolling waves
And chiseled rows of inscription,
The words murderer and stolen land
Taunt the base of the monument, the spray-
Paint’s dripping script legible but faint—
A verdict they’ve been trying to scrub
All this week,
the crews who’ve been at it,
Hazmatted in masks and rubber gloves.
On deck, dead-reckoning, Columbus
Stands his ground again, sanitized above us.
ii.
“Syria Mosque, Oakland, Pittsburgh”
W. Eugene Smith, 1955
A close-up shot of the Mosque: one of the pair
Of sphinxes bookending the stairs,
Her languorous lion’s body,
eyes lidded shut,
Pre-Raphaelite features lifted to the sun.
Her big paws and headdress-covered breasts.
A sash of “Shriner arabesques”
Frills the wall behind her. A fretwork turret.
The strip of calligraphy the light
Could be writing. Basking in her cast metal
She’s almost purring—
a cat on a windowsill
Who never failed to thrill me as a child.
Nor did the names below her, compiled
After the Armistice from lists of casualties,
Setting the stage for the rest of the century.
Diptych (II)
i.
Deepwater Horizon
First a doe breaking cover from the underbrush,
Chased by a pair of feral cats.
Then, days later,
the near wing-clipped collision
Of a nighthawk and bat.
They felt like omens when the rig went nova,
Riddling the reefs with those currents,
And the salt wedge of the estuary.
With crude oil and chemical dispersants.
After which,
the wrack of turtles and dying fish,
The tarred-and-feathered birds,
A sperm whale, fuchsia, filmed from above,
Breaching where the waters burned.
I still can’t get past what the cameraman said—
“It looked like it had been basted.”
ii.
“Zoo Owner Frees Animals, Kills Self”
The locks sprung on the cages, one by one,
Like the seals in some trial-run Revelation,
He sent them out into the Ohio night,
Wild and baffled,
overwhelmed by the scents
They’d caught hints of through their fences—
Gray wolves, black bears, shadow-shaped cats,
All scoped now within crosshairs
And the infrared light of the flares.
All but that poor wayward creature
Who’s about to mouth a round from his gun.
Walkie-talkie static.
Semi-automatic bursts.
The frost-lit lawns in lockdown . . .
Ohio, where the passenger pigeon died
Whose flights once plenished the skies.
“Pittsburgh Coke Company…”
AT CLAIRTON, PENNSYLVANIA”
David Plowden, 1973
You can see why he took this photograph,
The massive black shapes,
Burning and backlit,
All you can see on the other shore,
Smoke cloudbank’d above them,
Twilight on the river
At the bottom of the frame.
It looks like ruins from a bombed-out city—
Scattered chimneys, stories high,
Alone as though
Left standing,
The toppled slant of the conveyor belt—
A jerrybuilt Hades whose ovens cook coal.
He finds our mill towns
“unspeakably depressing,”
Though the erupting, industrial, scale of things
Stun him with something like beauty.
You can see it in
The lush black surfaces
He’s lavished on the coke works,
The shimmer of heaven in the water below.
The turbulence
And tenebroso.
“Seductively photographic,” he confesses,
The click of the shutter fixing the image.
Flat shapes stacked
In congested space.
The underworld boiling over.
Robert Gibb is the author of 14 books including, most recently, Pittsburghese, (Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, 2023). Other books include Sightlines (Prize Americana in Poetry, 2019), Among Ruins (Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, 2017), After (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, 2016), The Burning World (Miller Williams Poetry Prize, 2004) and The Origins of Evening (National Poetry Series, 1997). He has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an appearance in Best American Poetry and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award (2012) and Strousse Award (2011).