Moth Song

Virgil Elliott



  

Moth Song

I tasted it, the gold

In the gold, I saw the sweetness

At the end of my uncoiling

Tongue, by the beautiful ends

Of what curved from my forehead,

And I swam, gliding, I dove

Through the air toward gold

And sweetness meant to be

Chosen, begging to hold me

And be drawn inside me.

But I stop now, I hang

Still, suddenly suspended

Without having chosen to be

Still in a breeze still full

Of calling and beckoning

Red and blue around gold,

And what comes to meet me

Holds me and turns

My body, spinning a lightness

Around me to fold my wings

Close into a darkness,

And it turns me slowly

Into a flower and drinks me,

And I open, I become

Completely known, I blossom.

David Wagoner

Smoke and moths - we're seeing a lot of both of those these days. Forests burning, moths swarming - it's as if a surfeit, a splurge, a super-abundance has, yes, "blossomed" around us, swirled us within its rhythms, moved us with its influence. Every 10 or so years, when the conditions are just right, the moths come out in great numbers, any window with a light behind it is covered with fluttery moth-bodies, any outside light obliterated with feathered furies. Add to that this misty-musty thickness of smoking forests - it's a strange atmosphere. 

But the poem intrigues me for other reasons as well. This bewildering lure of destruction - what is this? What draws us toward our demise? Why do we dance with death? What is the fascination of fire? I have no answers to this, only questions.

Load

Henry Hillier Parker

Load

Today we carried home the last brown sheaf

and hookt the scythe against the dry barn wall:

the yellow border's on the chestnut leaf,

the beech leaf's yellow all.

Tomorrow we must bring the apples in,

they are as big as they shall ever be:

already starlings ready to begin

have tasted many a tree.

And in the garden, all the roses done,

the light lies gently, faint and almost cold,

on wither'd goldenrod and snapdragon

and tarnisht marigold.

John Hewitt

It is too easy to forget what the seasons really mean. Food! For the mouth and heart and eyes. And the different work that this entails. There was a time when the earth was closer to my everyday experience. But I have lost contact in many ways. Is it strange to find it in words, in poetry? Now, when I am walking the paved streets, I remember how it used to be. My mother in the garden, pulling up bright orange carrots, purple beets, washing them clean. Shelling peas, blanching endive, slicing green beans – each vegetable in its time, and time a succession of vegetable events. I miss earth time. Clock time is my conductor now, and it’s not the same.

Thank goodness for poetry and memory.

“Today we carried home the last brown sheaf.”

“Tomorrow we must bring the apples in.”

Caterpillar Song

The Caterpillar Of Phalaena Pini.

Caterpillar Song

Summer and leaves filled me

With a green drowse, now full

Of sleep I must turn

Leaflike, the fine thread

Comes from my lower lip

And fastens to a leaf, I am

Weaving around my fullness

A closing, a slow shuttling

To touch there and there

Where I will dream

All my hearts withering

And changing to a half-remembered

One in the air who quivers

Among leaves, who will know

Night after night by this

Night I spin around us how

Already it stirs

From sleep inside me, gathers

The leaves I have left

In me, how we begin

Together, it grows huge eyes

For me, and we wait

Behind them, it is growing

Shut wings, we wait between them

Night by night after this

Night spun around us, we know

Now is the time to soften

The way ahead for us, it opens,

The wet, shut wings come slowly

Out, they open, the veins

Fill them, they harden

And belong to us, we see

The night with all our eyes

At once, we move our wings

Apart among leaves, the one

Leaf with eyes to open

The night, not falling now

But rising and flying.

David Wagoner

"There where I will dream." How often do we imagine what it's like to wrap up in a chrysalis and change into a moth? To think of being like a caterpillar, feeding on green, growing, "changing to a half-remembered one" (as if there's a seed of something within, something I once was meant to be, and something from my future drawing me), spinning the Night around me. How the caterpillar feeds on leaves, and in time becomes a leaf-like creature, but one "rising and flying" rather than falling and dying. And the element of night? The unknown, hidden world only dimly grasped, where patterns weave us, in our sleep, in our dreams, into something new.

"Shut wings, we wait between them."

And what will we become?