"The arc of our lives is a brightening then dimming, brightening then dimming—" Arthur Sze The poets are writing about August: a loam-like smell lining the air, and salt- musk from every encircling body of water. Friends come to pick the not-yet-last harvest of figs from our tree, and as we reach up to twist the deep purple orbs off the stems, I think again of how each one is an inflorescence, a walled garden with a narrow passage through the ostiole small as a needle's eye. Warm to the touch and mostly ripe, they must be eaten soon or left to the birds of the air and the nimble climbers of trees. Inside these globes, rich with its burden of pollen and smaller than a child's eyelash, the female fig wasp tunnels into that corridor. Singular in its mission, it will tear off its limbs and shred its own wings to lay its eggs in the center of the fruit. Of this next generation, only females can leave in search of another flowering tree. The males do not have wings, and so will perish in the cloister where they were born. Forever and forever, this pattern repeats without judgment, without rancor or grief. A marriage, an obligation to flowering, to the elegies of increase.
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