How insipid you are, joking about our lovemaking. You’re sexual and athletic nonentities. I, in noteworthy contrast, can horizontally leap a distant meter, twenty times my body length. To match that, you’d have to long jump a hundred twenty feet. Imagine.

Do you know anyone who in a day can eat his or her body weight in food? For me, that’s easy, especially when I turn into a locust. Indeed, my trillions of friends and I can obliterate the sky and consume a nation.

Let’s turn to singing. Listen to yourselves. You can’t generate much sound without microphones. As a male grasshopper I ignore technology and croon to eager females by rubbing rows of pegs that line the insides of my hind legs. You’ll never get such a positive response. I’m not bragging.

I’m defending our dignity after you film us making love and laugh we’re not doing anything, the little male’s verily sleeping on the back of the huge female. In fact, I insert my aedeagus – imagine the penis of an anthropod – into the promised land and without cease I continue mating an hour, two hours, often a lot more, even a day or so. Then I usually die, not from exhaustion but because that’s what nature programs. Females perish after laying their eggs.

Step into this gallery and remember two of us alive and much larger than you, in a loving and tranquil state made permanent by the steel, muslin, beeswax, and damar resin of sculptor Cyrus Tilton.

Notes: Lovers is part of Cyrus Tilton’s exhibition The Cycle at Crocker Art Museum. He died of esophageal cancer at age thirty-nine in 2017.

“Lovers” by Cyrus Tilton

“Paint it Blue” by George Thomas Clark