for Elizabeth Bishop
For six days and nights
a luna moth, pale green,
pinned herself to the sliding screen—
a prize specimen in a lepidopterist’s dream.
Tuesday’s wind knocked her off the deck.
She tacked herself back up again.
During Wednesday’s rain she disappeared
and reappeared on Thursday
to meditate and sun herself,
recharging her dreams from dawn to dusk,
and all night draining the current from
the deck’s electric lantern.
A kimono just wider than my hand,
her two pairs of flattened wings were pale
gray-green panels of the sheerest crêpe de Chine.
Embroidered on each sleeve, a drowsing eye
appeared to watch the pair of eyes
on the wings below quite wide awake.
But they’re all fake.
Nature’s trompe l’oeil gives the luna
eyes of a creature twice her size.
The head was covered with snow-white fur.
Once, I got so close
it rippled when I breathed on her.
She held herself so still,
she looked dead. I stroked
the hem of her long, sweeping tail;
her wings dosed my fingers with a green-gold dust.
I touched her feathery antennae.
She twitched and calmly
reattached herself a quarter inch west,
tuning into the valley miles away
a moment-by-moment weather report
broadcast by a compatriot,
catching the scent of a purely
sexual call; hearing sounds
I never hear, having
the more primitive ear.
Serene
in the middle of the screen,
she ruled the grid of her domain
oblivious to her collected kin—
the homely brown varieties of moth
tranced-out and immobile,
or madly fanning their paper wings,
bashing their brains out on the bulb.
Surrounded by her dull-witted cousins,
she is herself a sort of bulb,
and Beauty is a kind of brilliance,
burning self-absorbed, giving little,
indifferent as a reflecting moon.
Clinging to the screen despite my comings
and goings, she never seemed to mind the ride.
At night, when I slid the glass door shut,
I liked to think I introduced her
to her perfect match
hatched from an illusion—
like something out of the Brothers Grimm—
who, mirroring her dreamy stillness,
pining for a long-lost twin,
regarded her exactly as she regarded him.
This morning,
a weekend guest sunbathing on the deck,
sun-blind, thought the wind had blown
a five-dollar bill against the screen.
He grabbed the luna, gasped,
and flung her to the ground.
She lay a long moment in the grass,
then fluttered slowly to the edge of the woods
where, sometimes at dawn,
deer nibble the wild raspberry bushes.
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