Bryan Walpert
Recalling Your Explanation
of the Differences Among Lepidoptera
Drawn by moonlight from
our room, a moth attaches
to shadows in a backyard
whose objects are merely ideas
that will in six hours grow
sure of their colors, daylight
a place for the butterfly,
which seeks shady camouflage
of branch or leaf, the moth
a sort of extension of shade,
reaching always for light
it is denied, each damned
to seek what the other wishes
to shed, though I should
avoid words like butterfly
not only because of a certain
sentimentality to which they
are attached but because
you taught me the Latin names—
Acherontia atropos
a reference to Acheron,
the underworld’s river of pain,
and Atropos, the Fate who cuts
life’s delicate thread—my mind
alighting tonight finally
on the notion that to
recollect,
for you, is to love, to forget
a form of resistance,
as though you painstakingly
net each word as gift
for me to pin to the board
of memory, my own too often
like a moth, which gets its
name
from an old word for gnawing
vermin, for given the
chance
will replace wool with an
inverse
of itself composed only of
light,
while the origin of butterfly
has been forgotten, like so
much
I’ve learned, some crediting
the Sulfur Butterfly’s color
or an old notion that these
insects
drank dairy (the German
means butter thief), others
suggesting the name
a transmutation of what
butterflies
do: flutter by, the lives
of Lepidoptera lasting less
than fourteen days. How long
is a day for any of us, the
seconds
that divide now and before
barely pausing to hover above
our bodies, melting between
blinks into the browning hedges
of summer’s unkempt border
into fall? No answer from you
who have been hanging for hours
from the high branch of sleep,
transmuting the day’s longings
in the chrysalis of thought; no
telling how many moth years
passed in the hours I lay
unsleeping
as its wings beat at our window
like
the buzz of a lamp or the
gnawing
of something unremembered,
before I briefly opened the
glass,
a breeze ruffling the
bedclothes,
then returned to wrap my limbs
in their gauze and watch the
flurry
of your eyelids, knowing I will
never
truly know the odd garments
they thread,
the rivers of pain you imagine
you must create to cross, just
as,
come morning, you will not
recollect my climb back into
bed
or a window closing to the
dark.
Currently a writing instructor at the University of Colorado-Boulder,
Bryan Walpert will begin teaching creative writing in January at
Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. His poems have
appeared most recently in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Drunken
Boat, In Posse Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore,
and the anthologies Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English
(Wesleyan 2000) and 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology
(Anamnesis Press 2001). He is currently seeking a publisher for his
completed manuscript, Still Life with Gerund. |