So Moses Wants to Stay in Egypt

Late May in Red Rock Country, and the plagues descend.
Every afternoon now, armies of grasshoppers
Decamped in the Indian grass around the house
Begin their suicidal assaults on the porch.
Perched on my knees they appear ornately armored
As feudal samurai, as Tiffany lampshades,
Absurdly decorative dress for a battle,
And battle it is of some kind, although I can't
Begin to understand their mad plan of attack.
I've read somewhere that cannibalism moves them,
That they only swarm when fleeing each other.
They pelt me in their desperation; then leap away.

And then there's the wind. On any given evening,
This sublimely peaceful valley, full of birdsong,
And of course the chorusing of all those insects,
Can gather its soft, sighing, blissful breezes,
And begin to hum, hiss, rumble, moan, and then rage,
Snapping the resilient tree branches back and forth
Rippling, then flattening the long dry grasses,
Driving even ravens and grasshoppers to ground,
Until tall dust devils, the ground itself disturbed,
Start swirling into life. The view from the window,
If one is lucky enough to be behind one
And foolish enough to look out, goes somber brown.

Meanwhile, inside the house, the clever mice hide out,
Making nests in the insulation and the trash.
Mammal myself, I have an unreasonable
Affection for these pests, whose motives I can grasp.
Every night I bait and set the traps, every night
Or almost, one of the quivering whiskered imps
Finds itself keeping house in one of my prisons,
Taking solace in the pine-nut hoard that lured it.
Come windy, grasshopper-tormented afternoon,
I cart out my cellmate, shit-smeared prison and all,
Set the trap on the floor of the truck and drive out,
To dump my friend somewhere fair, too far to come back.

Usually, I leave the valley and stop along
The River Road, sacred heart of geology
First haunted, then rafted, then mapped, then ranched, then filmed,
Then mined, then paved, then hiked, biked, and rafted again
By my personal species of mammalian pests,
The ones who write poems and give names to everything,
Although we are never entirely sure whether
We intend to ennoble ourselves or the things
Named with all our naming and renaming of them.
This time of year, both road and river become clogged,
The first with motorized and recreational
Vehicles of all sizes, swaying in the winds,

The latter with orange rafts, orange life-jackets,
Orange inner-tubes bearing orange-skinned humans
From climates more appropriate to hidden skin,
Floating and shouting and picnicking and camping,
Occasionally drowning, I suppose, to trust
The holiday postmortems in the local news.
Those who put up with grasshoppers, windstorms, and mice
On a yearly basis, who boast of paying dues
To live yearlong in this place that others visit,
Happily consider the visitors a plague
Unto themselves, although a plague one profits by,
As the locals once profited by grasshoppers.

In town, that plague of visitors spends hard,
The big, little, and medium spenders swarming,
Like the different sizes of grasshoppers (surely
You saw that simile coming), flinging themselves
At the gift shops, the gas stations, the grocery stores,
The windows of places promising adventures,
The porches of cafes and outdoor gear supply
Outlets, the tented parks setting up festivals
Of all the things that crowded people will fly to--
Food, music, art, and most peculiarly of all,
Each other, another outbreak species, I think
Archly, hiding out on this dusty, bug-strewn porch.