Robert Savino Oventile

Tarantula Hawk and Host

Leave a Comment / Trail Magic / Robert Savino Oventile

Wings orange, reddish, body bluish black with a stinger, antennae orange, six legs, eyes deep black, a tarantula hawk flies low to the ground, circling forward and back along a deer trail. The flight is noiseless, the circling patient.

Eight legs, eight eyes, fangs, body greyish black, hairy, a tarantula scuttles from a burrow and then settles among some pebbles shaded by the buckwheat adjacent the trail. The tarantula hawk lands near the spider and begins to clean her antennae.

Has a hiker ever fallen prone across this trail, thrashing, emitting agony’s sounds, uncontrollably, continuously, for about five minutes, electric pain crowding from the mind all else and revealing depths of vulnerability before unimagined?

With her antennae the wasp caresses the tarantula, who enters a quietude foreshadowing profounder stillness. She withdraws, cleans her antennae, approaches again and again caresses the spider. Then the attack, the brief grapple, the sting.

In the tarantula’s abdomen, the larva grows and feeds, feeds and grows, and, to prolong the host’s life in paralysis, defers to last the vital organs. Pupation follows. A few weeks later, from the tarantula, dead now, emerges a tarantula hawk.

Robert Savino Oventile hikes Eaton Canyon regularly. His poetry has appeared in The New Delta Review, Upstairs at Duroc, and The Denver Quarterly. He is coauthor with Sandy Florian of Sophia Lethe Talks Doxodox Down (Atmosphere, 2021). Robert is the current Poet Laureate of Local News Pasadena.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2024

Tarantula Hawk and Host Read More »

A building with a mountain in the background

Canyon Bridges

Leave a Comment / Trail Magic / Robert Savino Oventile

Daybreak at the crossing. The icy rivulet flows somewhat broader than a stride. Strange. You pause, and then you leap. At the apex of your quick bow over the murmuring water, tingles envelop you, from your bare head to your sandaled feet.

Over a labyrinth of posts, braces, and crossbeams (trestles in frozen march across the canyon), a flatbed truck rolls slowly, carrying upright, crated & cradled, a circular mirror, diameter 100 inches, 4.5 tons of glass. The procession ripples in the water pooled below.

Lighter than air, a promise arcs overhead, transparent to the sun’s rays. The empty sky above the high rock walls, the alders swaying in the breeze, the stream gleaming among wavering shadows, all testify: in the end, no one can drive their dreams away.

When floodwaters stove the trestle bridge, a Throop graduate recalled envisioning a grace-heavy arch curving above the streambed, the abutments firm in rock, in earth, with the deck on spandrels set to the harmonies of the graduate’s dancing numbers.

A plain girder bridge with two piers. Thick concrete sinewed with rebar. Simple lines. There, under dense gray clouds, my father leans over the guardrail to watch the cutwaters battle the torrent. I listen to boulders thud past and downstream.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2024

Canyon Bridges Read More »

Insulators

Leave a Comment / Trail Magic / Robert Savino Oventile

At the room’s east end, behind glass, on a mat woven of khaki reed strips, among a haphazard group of clay and stone artifacts, a finely knapped obsidian spear point rests, black, symmetrical, sharp, as ready for use now as when mammoths strode.

Against the room’s west wall, a section of pine utility pole holds on four wooden crosspieces dozens of insulators, mainly glass, blue, grey, green, clear, a few ceramic, black, white, black and white. Atop the pole a stuffed porcupine squats in profile.

Most often dark, silent, shut, the room harbors stillness, the display case’s stasis, the porcupine’s repose. A raccoon ever seeks to warm its forepaws at an iron cookstove ever cold. Yet reveries haunt the room, remaining distinct in their vistas.

Break an insulator on the concrete floor and knap a shard of glass into an arrowhead. Giant ground sloths forage for leaves, dire wolves range in packs, condors wheel high, all amidst ample scrub and woodlands near mountains with thick snow caps.

Place an insulator on the reception counter to hold a loop of the ethernet cable and boot the laptop. The ocean encroaches inland, chaparral arches the interstate here and there, office towers sustain the touch of time, all under a sky without contrails.

Insulators Read More »