Luna Moths
On the day I realize my father
might be ill, two luna moths appear
like lime-green handprints stuccoed
on the white walls of my office studio.
This husband and wife come to me
from the boughs of my black walnut tree.
While their spread wings cure, eight
eyespots fix on my clumsy, worried haste.
Because the moths only live to mate,
they do not have mouths. They do not eat.
Flying at night, the moonly moths live
for a week. This is all the span they have.
Now, fading by day like scraps of fabric,
the pair rests. Their feathery antennae tick
lightly in June gusts. At twilight, a sheer
single hand almost waves at me as it flutters
across the pale gold disk fobbed firmly,
like a pocket watch, to the deep blue sky.
Elegy. Acknowledgement of grief. Awareness of the void we feel in even the most beautiful of summer days. Over seven million families around the world—1.2 million in the United States alone—will forever hear that word, Corona, and feel every nerve in the body plucked like a bass string, reverberating deep. But elegy is one face of a two-sided coin, and the obverse is celebration—knowledge of how a certain face, a familiar voice made our day brim with abiding joy. We each carry our share of unvoiced elegies, for losses great and small; and we must also find in our awareness the possible celebration every new day presents, simply to maintain our humanity. Often a poet’s work assists us in both.
I am struck by Jo’s surprising use of language, subtle but affecting. Think of all the verb choices available to the poet when she describes those two luna moths—fastened? affixed?—no, “stuccoed/ on the white walls of my office studio.” And when those creatures are drying their wings in the sun, I never for a second doubted that her choice of “cured” was anything but a sad double entendre for what even a loving daughter cannot offer her father. Such an accumulation of telling details in the poem: that single pale hand fluttering; that shockingly brief lifespan; that dreamlike pocket watch in the sky—and before we realize it, the moth’s fate, the father’s, and our own are quietly intertwined.
I think of Jo Pitkin as an Arlingtonian—even though, after fifteen years, she traded the waters of Spy Pond for the majestic Hudson River in upstate New York. What I remember best were her tireless labors on the yearly Heart of the Arts Festival, back when the Arlington Center for the Arts was young, helping our town to enjoy the work of painters, dancers, musicians, craftspeople and, yes, poets. Jo’s poems have a painter’s eye and a musician’s sense of rhythmic invention. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections including Commonplace Invasions where today’s poem first appeared. “Luna Moths” is sort of a pre-elegy when the prospect of her father’s loss first entered her consciousness. But in my reading, it’s a tribute to our sense of relationship—to the people we most care about and the places that summon our deepest attention. In pronouncing her quiet words, in imagining the brief beauty of the luna moth, we too might feel the complexity of our moment: its somber joy, its pained exultation.