The Moths of Late Spring

The moths are everywhere;

when you unfocus your eyes,

the woods are filled with their 

dusty featherweight wings.

 

Their erratic spiraling seems

so aimless it's hard to imagine

how they ever reproduce, 

and yet: here they still are.

 

They even have their own beauty,

if you catch a glimpse of one resting 

briefly on a tree trunk: silver and beige

painted delicately on a fine cloth.

 

K. is on a boulder by the stream

waiting to see if she can spy a fish,

one of the tiny ones so far uphill.

The moths flit about her, ephemeral.

 

The boulder under her is on 

its own journey, out of the epic

glacial past and into an entirely

unknowable future, so slowly 

 

that around it, the lot of us—

the fish, the moths, 

even the whole forest—

are all whirling aimlessly about.

 

I do not know what will happen

tomorrow. Yesterday is still 

an aching tooth in my head.

Today is a mystery I have yet to solve.

 

And yet, here we still are.

The moths of late spring

are everywhere, after all,

once you begin looking.