There is no patron saint of ticks,
no otherworldly spokesman
to articulate the tickly virtues,
to make glorious the tickly thread
coherent in the fraying web of life.
My rescue dog is on his back,
and I am kneeling, searching
for the stubborn stud I felt before
and lost. I hold the flashlight
in my mouth and sift through fur,
believing that there is no way
to reconcile multiple allegiances.
I find the dog tick, blood-drawn,
highly specialized, a vector
who goes back a hundred million years,
descended from the Late Cretaceous, destined
to know one way through the world.
No barnacle, no aerialist
whose jaws clamp down on leather
hanging from a wire high
between two buildings in a city
that prefers its tensions crystallized
like so is more tenacious.
I’m as close to being God
as I will ever be,
and still I have no power to compel
Saint Valentine, the patron saint
of bees, to make a little room
in his protectorate for ticks,
who suffer like the bees
from neurotoxins in addition
to the immolations and the drownings
and the suffocations via Vaseline.
Saint Valentine can handle one more
vulnerability, one more enduring
form of life whose forebears crawled
among the dinosaurs so long
before the hominin was just
a gleam in evolution’s eye, so long
before a drop of human blood was to be had.
Saint Valentine, I know you can
and, if you do, I won’t tell
anyone again of your removal
from the General Roman Calendar in 1969
for reasons I will keep between ourselves.