The errant pair may be hidden in a distant glade—or dingly dell—gazing upward through the leaves, wondering “what star should be their home when love becomes immortal,” and listening to him, as he scrapes the melodies out of the night with that infernal, insistent, and slang-infected song:
“She’s beat it—she’s beat it—she’s beat it—
Come back—come back—come back—
You skate—you skate—
You’ve swiped—you’ve swiped
My mate—my mate—my mate!”
Intermittently he seems to muffle the ragged rhyme, and merge into virulent vers libre—imagistic muse and amputated prose—containing sound projectiles, of low trajectory, that winnow the aisles of the forest for an erring spouse who has fled beyond the range of common rhyme.
Perhaps it’s all wrong—about this insect having loved—for love is a holy thing, and it may be that it abides not among the things that have wings and stings. It would seem that he who could trill this nerve-destroying song could know no love, or that it was ever in the world.
It may be that this emerald villain has been outlawed by his kind, and he’s filing, up there in the dark, on some terrible iron thing, that he’s sharpening to annihilate the tribe that banned him. He may be sawing of a branch, and, if so, I hope he’s straddling the part that’ll fall off when he’s through. Maybe he’s got some ex-friend up there, pinioned to the bark, and he’s boring him to death, by telling him the same thing—the same thing—the same thing—o’er and o’er and o’er.
I wish that some gliding fluffy owl, or other rover of the darkened woods, would only pause a moment, and divest the bough of this green-mantled wretch, and then that some mighty ravenous bird would collect the people we know, who come and scrape on something that’s inside of them—lay a sound barrage before us—fret the air with piffle, and with sorrows all their own—and chant a woeful ceaseless cadence, like the green arboreal fiend, whose sonorous and satanic notes assail us from the bough. Miscreated, malignant, and hellish though they and the fiend may be, they all revel in that rare joy that comes only to him who has found his life work.
For our sins must we be scourged, else, why are these people?
And,
Pourquoi—pourquoi—pourquoi—
Is this
Katydid—Katydid—Katydid?
After listening patiently to the reading of the production, my unfeeling prosaic friend Sipes remarked, “Gosh, we gotta git that insect ’fore it gits dark ag’in!”