I should stop smoking. For in my body, the world’s largest moth
closes her wings over Georgia, U-pick tomato fields,
red ripe plump lungs I had back then, dew wet, pungent, we can’t
all be tough fruit, juicy—I miss mowing fields there in a bikini
across the dirt road from the Mexican farmer, soaked
bandana holding his hair back, gloss winged crow, we breathed
so easy, working our rows, neither waving nor speaking—
the sky grew lungs there—crepe myrtle budding.
Her giant cloud wings storm out the gulf shore—submerge boats,
so down with dreams I could have been a Florida sailor
hauling up oysters, water licked pearl lungs I had then,
enough fresh air to swim out past Dog Island, instead of these
coughing up salt lungs, we can’t all be so glistening—
I miss combing the beach at night where turtles lugged
suitcase bodies through sea oats, breathing was easy—even
the sunset had great lungs there, pink & spongy.
Some days her wings unhinge, joggers pass on their way to yoga,
I live at the foot of Adirondacks, you have to hide your
moth here, where health is Zion, I snuff my cigarettes in a pocket
& shut my mouth to keep my moth from flying out—this is not
Alabama, you can’t pick up a nice hitchhiker, smoke over
waffles in a tuck stop, find a blues dive to singe the wings
of the moth winging in your ribcage—in Alabama,
lungs echoed in trumpets, ditto sad dobros.
Some days I forget I hold two cigarettes feeding two moth wings
simultaneously, they gain weight, press so hard I barely
make out docks by Pontchartrain—it’s not that I want to paddle
back through swampland where my lungs inhaled & exed wild
iris, I know Louisiana moss was fat with redbugs, pollen
puffed asthmatic halos, cottonmouth always killing some kid
who drug his stick in the wrong muck, where any lung
with two legs, somehow, got screwed up.
If you said, in Mississippi, My moth eats a hole in the wool of my breath
they’d think you’re drunk, all lungs are tank tops, cottony,
humid—I miss cattle egret, guess those fields were a 7-11 serving
Big Gulps of mosquitoes, how, you ask, could I miss the South
so much a moth makes dust rags from my insides? Or, if you
loved it, why then leave it? Maybe I didn’t—but I ran so fast there
trains seemed lazy, even sitting still for Sunday football, my
lungs rode high on wind between quarterbacks.
What is my moth—I ask the lord. If I move back home will she
dissolve—in the region where my ex-lovers leave a trail
of tears to Texas & mother’s ashes make an acid soil for magnolia
to grow in? I miss my sister & daddy hoeing up lungs there—
my friend in his small green house, pouring bourbon
to beat back his own moth—is she death I am half in love
with? One wing caved black from loss, the other a tourniquet
to save heart-sap from leaking down porch steps?
The only distinction between a moth & a butterfly is clubbed
antennae. It is January, white moths fall from the clouds
outside my body—I should put on skis & flatten them cross-
country like everyone else in the Adirondack foothills, where
my feet are clubs, where my moth folds over old
geography I should stop burning, like houses here burn with
their families still in them—I should learn to love, or want
lungs opening like two giant, born-again peonies.
