Luna Moth by Carl Phillips

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.