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APOLOGIES TO A MOTH

Forget the striated flutter caught in the door
like a summons to the high court
of the lyric moment; forego the Oz green luna
lovely beyond night’s cobalt
aesthetic; pass over the ragged palpitations
in the dust, mummified, and, alive,
with a fiendish jones for the moon
that is everywhere, everywhere, burning
up. About one poem, she said
attention was sexy and it was now time
to pay that debt—kissing her
leg, like happy hour, was a fetish
somewhere. Forget the scar,
faint, a crescent nick, lambent
in the light on her shin
she cut, years ago, shaving while drunk,
and forget the hay light
of her hair. Her breasts were more
than the architecture
of adolescence—
but what do I know about the pinwheel earth?
Only that once I wrote
a love poem, full of autumn
light that seems so like
a commodity, rare and wire-thin like the sky,
and for that poem I still
vibrate with a foolishness
that won’t leave. In it,
she swam in lakewater and found eggs
salting the surface
and split them open with her water-soft nail—
embryonic turtles
mothered her girl-palm for a moment
before dying. I loved
her broken heart, even
then. And mine beneath bone forgets to beat.