Moths

I've been thinking about all the relatively common creatures with which I've shared my time on Earth. For example, I can't recall a summer in which I didn't see houseflies or gnats. Robins and bees and I have always lived adjacent to each other, more or less. Apparently mites live in all of our beds, or so I've been told.

Raccoons have walked in and out of my life, chiefly at night, and I used to go with my father and his hound dogs when he "hunted" raccoons. Actually, he just liked to tree them, "tree" being a hunter's verb for using dogs to induce the hunted to climb a tree. For some reason, my father liked to do this in the winter. I recall my feet freezing in insufficient "galoshes," and I recall the excitement of the hunt wearing off rather quickly. Once the raccoon was "treed," my father would shine a flashlight on its perturbed face, call the dogs back, put them in the back of the truck, and off we'd go, back home. The raccoon must have thought, "What the hell was that all about?!" Not a bad question, actually. My father really liked the sound of hounds' voices--and getting out in the cold, clear air underneath stars. That was what that was all about.

I don't ever remember living in a room, apartment, or house that wasn't visited by moths, either on the outside (fluttering around a porch-light) or on the inside (clinging quietly to a wall or the inside of a lamp-shade, or living in a closet). I remember seeing some extraordinarily bizarre and beautiful moths in the Sierra Nevada. I wish now that I'd taken the time to learn their names--I mean their scientific names, not Bob or Alice the moth. The stillness of moths fascinates. Sometimes moths make me think of butterflies who decided to become priests, nuns, rabbis, or Buddhist monks.

The following poem concerns cohabitation with moths. It was first published in a magazine called The Kerf, published by the College of the Redwoods in California. "Kerf" means the track or cut left by a saw. Strangely, I had never heard or read the word, and I grew up with a carpenter-father and in a region where logging and wood-cutting were commonplace. So when the magazine accepted the poem, I looked up the word. It's a good word; it sounds nice. Here's the poem:

Moth Anxiety

One result of Evolution
is that two small moths and I
are in this room now. They

live on my wall, gray flecks
on pale paint. Maybe they

move when I sleep. When I’m
awake, they’re still.

I’ve seen moth-holes in sweaters
but never caught moths eating.

Why don’t moths live amongst sheep
and cut out the middle step of knitting?
Is there such a thing as a moth-idea?

Do those new to English wonder
about “moth” and “mother”?

What’s the name of the enzyme
allowing moths to digest wool?

My wardrobe-door is open.
The moths remain,
composed, upon my wall.

first published in The Kerf (2004), ISBN 0-9746274-0-2 (p. 34).