Chewing on the Pages

I search for Annie Dillard's
Teaching a Stone to talk, forget
the title, ask for Talking to a Stone.
Ah ha, you've met my father,
says the clerk. I fall in love:
the intellectual seduction.

Captured by my laughter,
he informs me of an essay
on the FDA-approved
amount of insect heads in fig paste,
penned, of course, by Mary Roach,
delicious motes, those 13 skulls
per hundred grams. We touch

and segue to Butler's opus Severance,

on the 1.5 minutes following

decapitation, imagining the 90 seconds
of a Praying Mantis male who wonders,
as the female bites his head off
after serving her a dozen hours,
Was she disappointed, wanted
something more than sex?

Non sequitur: the pale book louse
survives on moisture, on the humid
thrill of paper, bindings, books.