vienna

goodnight, sweetheart.

i found you in the grass when i got home tonight

*

not as you were meant to be, but as something interrupted.

*

a luna moth,

green as the hidden underside of summer,

laid beneath the hose where our cat had left the evidence of a brief and ancient hunger.

*

your wings were gone. ripped off and through.

*

those which carried you through the dark had been torn away,

and what remained seemed too small to contain the beauty that had been there.

*

i knelt beside you on the concrete

scooped your delicate body into my hands

your little legs cling to my fingers

i will not let you go. i promise.

i will not let you go alone.

*

the world around us carried on -

an owl wept in the far off trees

the stars hung overhead

a feline stalked another bug in the darkness.

*

yet there you were,

a fragment of moonlight discarded in the grass.

*

i thought of how little time

you were ever given.

how little time you were destined to have.

*

luna moths, in adult form, do not have mouths.

they cannot eat in their time on this earth.

*

i thought of how you have starved.

within your tattered wings i see my own.

*

the things i reach for that cannot feed me,

the names i repeat like prayers,

the doors i stand clawing before long after they've closed.

*

you were born carrying an absence.

you were born hungry

we live to die, you and me.

*

the moth spends its brief life searching for what it was made to find,

burning through itself for a touch in the dark.

*

i myself have done the same

mistaking longing for nourishment,

devotion for bread.

*

we love you. please eat.

*

i think of your patience

the time spent waiting in your cocoon until at last you emerged

wings painted delicately, something dreamed rather than made.

*

and for what?

*

a handful of nights.

a few silent journeys through the darkness.

a brief search for another beneath the stars.

and this.

*

no storm.

no winter.

no grand ending.

only the claws of a predator.

*

did you find what you were looking for?

*

in my hands you struggle

over and over you try to fly, but everytime you find you are missing a part of yourself

*

your little legs cling to my fingers

it will be over soon. i promise.

it will be over soon.

*

looking at you,

i felt it settle over me.

i weep.

*

you are every song cut short,

every letter unfinished,

every goodbye arriving too soon.

*

you were so fragile.

not weak. do not be mistaken.

fragile in the way of the waters surface

in the way all lovely things seem to exist

on the thinnest edge of presence

*

i move your body and lay you in a budding flower

i hope it will feel like home.

*

the petals bent around you.

*

the wind moved softly through it,

as if night itself

were trying not to disturb your rest.

*

i wonder whether beauty always carries this sorrow within it:

the certainty that it cannot stay.

*

you hurt my heart

i cannot help you. im sorry.

*

for a long time I stayed there,

keeping watch over a creature whose name I did not know nor decide until after it was gone.

*

a small witness to a small tragedy

no one else would notice.

*

i love you. im sorry. forgive me.

*

standing above you,

i mourn not only what you were,

but all the beautiful things in this world that survive so long becoming themselves,

only to disappear almost as soon as they arrive.

*

i love you. im sorry. forgive us.

*

goodnight, sweetheart.