arækni's web

I am moonlight and moth flight, owl wing and wonder. I am flutter and flicker, last glimmer of twilight, first shimmer of starlight. I will take wing and dance in the shadow of moonbeams, for you my beloved, for you.

Your face shone / the first safe beacon I had ever seen. / I held on to that light / as a moth that knows night is coming / chooses to burn.

Clouds are not only vapor, but shape, mobility, silky sacks of nourishing rain. The pear orchard is not only profit, but a paradise of light. The luna moth, who lives but a few days, sometimes only a few hours, has a pale green wing whose rim is like a musical notation. Have you noticed?

I could not ask her, she could not tell me why something had once made her weep. Had made her cover up her mouth and eyes in the slow work of the moth fed on white mulberry leaves. Had made her say: from now on daylight be black- and-white and menial in-betweens and let the distances be made of silk. My distances were made of grit and the light rain throws away in the hour between planets. And rush-hour traffic. My keys were ready.  

What she knew was gone and what I wanted to know she had never known: the moment her sorrow entered marble -   the exact angle of the cut at which the sculptor made the medium remember its own ordeal in the earth, the aeons crushing and instructing it until it wept itself into inches, atoms of change. Above all, whether she flinched as the chisel found that region her tears inferred, where grief and its emblems are inseparable.

Goodnight now. I am so sleepy — I feel like a moth, with heavy scarlet eyes and a soft cape of down — a moth about to settle in a sweet bush . . . Would it were — ah, but that’s improper.