A Parliament of Moths

The sum of the world’s griefs rests between us

on a rickety wooden table. They fit, with room

to spare, at the bottom of the chipped china

tea cup that sits before me. It reminds me

of the porcelain bowl I used to shave this morning,

splintered with thin gray spiderweb cracks. The tea cup,

the man tells me, is from Vienna, where he studied

as a young man before returning home just before

the war started, this home where we both now sit and talk.

The chip is in the rim of the cup, and a threadlike

crack runs halfway down, it is the kind of divot that the upper lip

cannot help but find when I drink; I do not turn

the cup around to drink from the other side.

The light bulb overhead buzzes, and through the open

window come fluttering wings and the sounds of

evening settling over the village.

He used to, he says, love to watch his daughter

play with the tea cup and her doll; she had beautiful

hands, he says, long pale fingers, I wish she could have

had a piano to play. The daughter is, of course, not here;

she is why I am here, it is no recompense.

The curtain flutters, someone outside is singing, the

first stars are emerging in the purple sky, the sun

is eaten by the mountains in the distance,

their round tops like the knobs of a great spine.

Two weeks before he died, my brother and I went camping

in the mountains, partly to celebrate my graduating

high school. The trail led upward for hours, evergreens

towered on both sides, deer and rabbits and hawks

peered at us and then decided we were, in fact,

the nothing we really were and went back to their lives.

We found a fire lookout at the top of a ridge that looked

out over a forested valley at the base of which was a

lake that looked like some god, playing roughly with

some other god, had torn a sapphire from the

gauntlet of his foe and in the scrabble for purchase, it

had fallen and landed here. We drank and talked

about the years to come, that seemed innumerable

as the stars overhead and just as bright.

Side by side we slept; or rather, he slept and I lay

awake, because the night had settled upon us like

bad news and I lay down in my sleeping bag with

a growing sense that when I woke up, everything

would be different, because moments of beauty and

of chaos walk hand in hand like brothers. Pink light

came in through the window and lay across his face,

I lifted my hand and my black fingers appeared on his

sleeping eyes and cheek, surrounded by the

blood-light cast by Mars high in the night. Trembling,

I got up and went out into the warm night. I stood

looking up, pale wings whispering against my bare skin,

at the far pinprick of ruby, shining like some warning light

on us all, or perhaps just he and I. Please don’t, I told the

far world, please you cannot. But the galaxy is a big place

for words to get lost in, and the wars inside grind on just as do

the wars of the world and after all

what is the point of a treaty, if your

body stays at war? The wings battered at me like

a ghost kissing my body over and over, I sat down on

a rock still hot from the day’s sun and looked out

at the little lake, its surface now bloody. Something

flew past me in the pink night, into the trees, and then

flew right back out again, right at me, I felt the breeze

of its passing on my cheek, the brush of a feather on

my shoulder. It is fleeing, I thought, from whatever

is held in this light. Back inside, he is washed in

the pale red light and I cannot look at his beautiful face

without shaking. In the morning, I say I want to go home

and he smiles and we begin to pack up and walk down

again, through the trees; he steps off the trail to piss

and into a cloud of butterflies. He laughs, he says Look

at them, and I look at them and I laugh too; they wreath his head like

a May virgin’s crown. My breath catches in my throat,

this is the last moment of joy I will ever experience

and I feel the certainty: the butterflies, the pink light of Mars,

the feather against my shoulder, our laughter all fit

at the base of a hollow in my chest, vast enough to hold

all sorrows, to hold them safely,

like tea in a tea cup, like a wish, like a prayer

lost in the dark, drifting through the night,

up through the branches of tall trees,

lighter and lighter as it rises, passing through

atmosphere and into the stars, where there are

no wings to beat it back, no light to make it cry.