Gall

“Men are just bigger, more complicated gall wasps.” –Alfred Kinsey

Gall bumps blister the arms of the oak.
Within these bulges, gall wasps gestate.
Every other generation
of these flightless, unarmed specks
reproduces without having sex.
The tree tumors, or oak apples,
occur when venom is injected into the bark
by the female when she lays her eggs.
The hatched larvae bide their time
inside these warts, sometimes for years,
before gnawing their way free of their woody tombs.

Acid extracted from these galls
was once used to make ink. Leonardo used it
to draw fantastic war machines and
cross-sections of the human body,
to sketch the Blessed Virgin and her Kin.

In twenty years of taxonomy, Alfred Kinsey
collected seven and a half million gall wasps,
carefully measuring and pinning each
to a tiny card. Eventually
he moved on to human sexual histories,
making eighteen thousand recordings
of married men and women confessing
their deepest sexual secrets, habits, perversions.
Their stories were crunched into statistics;
passion transformed into numbers.
The establishment found the results upsetting.
Kinsey was accused of being a deviant,
of being gay, as was Leonardo.

At picnics with my good Catholic parents,
I would catch yellowjackets
in pop bottles. The insects would alight
on the glass lip, then crawl inside,
only to become trapped
in the sticky sludge at the bottom.

I had no scientific interest in these pests,
and I would have revived them
if I could -little buzzing Lazaruses!-
if only to kill them again and again,
like in a video game or shooting gallery,
fulfilling that human dream
of death without consequence,
death with need of neither science
nor conscience.

Sixty years after Kinsey’s passing,
the California law barring gay marriage
was overturned, the judge citing
scientific evidence that disproved the idea
of homosexuality as family blight.
The voters stare up at the clusters of oak apples
and shudder, seeing infestation,
seeing disease, seeing sin.
Distrustful of science, they would eliminate
everything they deem ugly or immoral.
They pin their victims not for knowledge,
but for the sake of the pinning,
haunted by the extermination
of their own sexless specimen, himself pinned
to some supposedly unblemished tree.