POEM
Luna Moth
No eye that sees could fail to remark you:
like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and
flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But
what leaf, this time of year, is so pale,
the pale of leaves when they’ve lost just
enough green to become the green that means
loss and more loss, approaching? Give up
the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost
gets forgotten: that was the thought that I
woke to, those words in my head. I rose,
I did not dress, I left no particular body
sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw
you, strange sign, at once transparent and
impossible to entirely see through. and how
still: the still of being unmoved, and then
the still of no longer being able to be
moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I’ve
found it.... If I think of, increasingly, my
own.... If I look at you now, as from above,
and see the diva when she is caught in mid-
triumph, arms half-raised, the bock as if
set at last tree of the green sheath that has—
how many nights?—held her, it is not
without remembering another I once saw:
like you, except that something. a bird, some
wild and neccssarv hunger, had gotten to it:
and like the diva, but now broken, splayed
and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her.
I remember the hands, and—how small they
seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.
Carl Phillips, “Luna Moth” from From the Devotions. Copyright © 1998 by Carl Phillips. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Source: From the Devotions (Graywolf Press, 1998)
