Moths have a potent duality of effects on me: they attract and repel with just about equal force. On the one hand, there is their Victorian opulence of velvet wings and ostrich-feathered antennae and their widely looping sweeps of flight as if borne effortlessly on air currents themselves rather than lofting on and above them under power. They can look like jewels tossed into the air or, as hawk moths can sometimes do, trick the unwary watcher into thinking they’re bright, buzzing hummingbirds on the wing.
On the other hand, that sort of squishy, bloated, heavy softness of moths’ bodies and their voracious appetites for things I’d rather have kept to myself (dry goods in the pantry, tender leaves in the garden, and favorite fine woolens) fills me with nervousness that makes the revulsion they inspire in horror stories utterly plausible to me. I can’t help but remember the sweltering summer night when I was young and my family, having been out for a happy holiday evening, stopped at the local gas station to refill the bottomless tank of our giant station wagon; since it was so sweltering, we all piled out of the car to go into the tiny, grubby cashier’s hut where an electric fan was humming and, having an uneasy sense of something untoward behind me, I turned around to see a veritable dust storm of fat moths, attracted by the shop’s fluorescent lights, throwing themselves in spongy, flapping frenzy at the glaring glass until it was almost opaque with their wing-scale dust. Oh, yes, and the fabulously nasty short story ‘The Cocoon’ (John B. L. Goodwin) has never quite left my subconscious mind (awake or asleep) once I read it a few decades ago.
On top of all this, I married a guy who had once had a small moth fly into his ear, get caught and frantic, and instead of finding its way out, worked its creepy, fluttering way right down to beat against his eardrum until a doctor could eventually get the creature out of there. Enough said. I can still look, at times, with a certain dispassionate interest and think of moths as intriguing bits of scientific wonder and visual astonishment, and then I must quickly look away again and reassure myself that there’s not something truly wrong with them. I did at least decide to write a little bit to see if, in the incident of the attack on my husband’s ear, I could imagine the experience from the moth’s point of view.
Labyrinth
I crawled the narrow halls in
Darkness ever deepening,
Thinking I might find some clear way through
But too tightly fitted in, too close,
No chance of going back or backing out,
No scent I could recognize to bring me
Back to the distant shore,
No vision, not a speck of spectral light to give
A guide around those curves crepuscular, those turns
Winding ever more toward claustrophobia, to where
The heat was growing more intense, the sound
Of a pulsing drum seeming to speak of waves, making
Me dream the ocean lay ahead—but behind me, in
The now impenetrable night, some Thing, a dragon
It seemed to me, began to drown the liquid lure
Of the drumbeat ahead with its own more frightful,
Louder noise, and then to scrabble wildly at me
With its terrifying claws, at which it seemed
The labyrinth must finally swallow me and
Draw me down into its fatal end—but then—
In a turn of events that was quite shockingly detached
From any turns my path had made
Thus far, the whole puzzling place tipped
Over on its side—there I lay, too fixed
In the halls’ constricting ways to turn and follow or
To roll, and the sea broke forth on me at last, a rush
Of saline waves tearing upon me, heaving me out
Of where I’d wedged, and in a cataract, sent me
Blasting right back through all the sightless turns
Of that preternatural dark, shot me with my sodden
Useless wings back into blazing day where I
Could lie, quivering faintly in my long-lost world,
Deciding whether it was time to die or time
To spread my fragile wings and see
If there was any life left in them.
Hummingbird Unmasked
