One night a moth flew into
the candle, was
caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been
staring at the candle, or maybe I looked
up when
a shadow crossed my page; at any rate,
I saw it
all.
A golden female moth, a biggish one with a
two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire,
dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck,
flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her mov-
ing wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging
the
circle of light in the clearing and creating
out of
the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of
my
sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed
by my
side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the
light contracted again and the moth’s
wings van-
ished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her
six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and
ceased,
disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in
spasms, making a spattering noise; her
antennae
crisped and burned away and her heaving
mouth
parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all
over, her head was, so far as I could determine,
gone, gone the long way of her wings and
legs.
Had she been new, or old? Had she mated
and
laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that
was left was the glowing horn shell of
her abdo-
men and thorax – a fraying, partially
collapsed
gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s
round
pool.
And then this moth-essence, this spectacular
skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burn-
ing.
The wax rose in the moth’s body from her
soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged
hold where her head should be, and widened
into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that
robed her
to the ground like any immolating monk. That
candle had two wicks, two flames of identical
height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire.
She burned for two hours, until I blew
her out.
She burned for two hours without changing,
without bending or leaning – only
glowing
within, like a building fire glimpsed through
sil-
houetted walls, like a hollow saint, like
a flame-
faced virgin gone to God, while I read
by her
light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris
burnt out
his brains in a thousand poems, while night
pooled wetly at my feet.
