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 body as if set at last free 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 necessary 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.