Perhaps when I stepped outside
To listen to the whisper
Of conversation between
The owls in the trees, backyard,
And then slipped in again
Through the sliding glass door,
A thin black moth flew too close behind me
Just at the wrong moment
And fell prisoner all night
Trapped between the two doors--
A pane of glass
And a mesh of screen.
I saw it this morning, the moth,
Looking like a forgotten, misplaced comma,
A simple stain of black ink
On the reflective page--
A sentence trailing off,
Saying nothing,
Staring out at the green of trees and grass
And the blue of sky
It could recall now only as a memory,
Only now as remembered desire,
And wondering, perhaps, just
What had happened
To the slightest breeze
That could, in the best of moth-moments,
Suddenly unwrinkle its
Black rice-paper wings and
Lift it to the green and blue
beyond,
With nothing to connect to now.
So I slid open the doors
And let it go.
It flew tentatively within
The morning's warmth,
As if unsure what to do
With its new-found freedom,
Circled drunkenly for a second or two,
And then lifted clumsily carefree
Toward the protective canopy of leaves,
A balance of mindfully intentioned
Parallelism
And freefall fluttering
Stream-of-consciousness,
A chance to pause,
Until, in a flare of brilliant sunshine
I lost it somewhere far above,
somewhere,
connected.
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