I
live alone with two cats, who sleep on my legs. There
is a yellow one, and a black one whose name
is Small. In the
morning, I joke to the black one, Do you remember
last
night? Do you remember? I throw them both out before
breakfast, so I can eat.
There is a spider, too, in the bathroom, of uncertain
lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab,
whose six-inch
mess of web works, works somehow, works
miraculously, to
keep her alive and me amazed. The web is in a
corner behind
the toilet, connecting tile wall to tile wall. The
house is
new, the bathroom is immaculate, save for the
spider, her
web, and the sixteen or so corpses tossed on the
floor.
Today the earwig shines darkly, and gleams what there is
of him: a dorsal curve of thorax and
abdomen, and a smooth
pair of pincers by which I knew his name. Next
week, if the
other bodies are my indication, he'll be shrunk
and gray,
webbed to the floor with dust. The sow bugs beside
him are
curled and empty, fragile, a breath away from
brute fluff.
The spiders lie on their sides, translucent and
ragged,
their legs drying in knots. The moths stagger
against each
other, headless, in a confusion of arcing strips
of chitin
like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttresses
for
cathedral vaults, like nothing resembling moths, so that I
would hesitate to call them moths, except
that I have had
some experience with the figure Moth reduced to a
nub.
Two summers ago, I was camped alone in the Blue Ridge
Mountains of Virginia. I had hauled myself
and gear up there
to read, among other things, The Day on Fire, by
James
Ullman, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a
writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it
would do it
again. So I read every day sitting by a tree,
while warblers
sang in the leaves overhead and beside worms
trailed their
inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet, and I read
every
night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest
and pale moths seeking mates massed round
my head in the
clearing, where my light made a ring.
Moths kept flying into the candle. They would hiss and
recoil, reeling upside down in the shadows
among my cooking
pans. Or they would singe their wings and fall,
and their
hot wings, as if melted, would stick to the first
thing they
touched- a pan, a lid, a spoon-so that the snagged
moths
could struggle only in tiny arcs, unable to flutter free.
These I could release by a quick flip with
a stick; in the
morning I would find my cooking stuff decorated
with torn
flecks of moth wings, ghostly triangles of shiny
dust here
and there on the aluminum. So I read the book, and
boiled water,
and replenished candles, and read on.
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 the shadow crossed my page;
at any
rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a
biggish one with
a two-inch wingspread, flapped into the fire,
drooped
abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, and
frazzled in a
second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue
paper, like
angels' wings, enlarging the circle 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
vanished 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 burnt away and her
heaving
mouthparts cracked 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. Her head was a
hole lost to
time. All that was left was the glowing horn shell
of her
abdomen 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 burning.
The wax rose in
the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her
thorax to
the shattered hole where her head should have
been, and
widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame that
robed her
to the ground like an immolating monk. That candle
had two
wicks, two winding flames of identical light, 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
swaying or kneeling-only glowing within,
like a boiling fire
glimpsed through silhouetted 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 brain in
a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my
feet.
So. That is why I think those hollow shreds on the bathroom
floor are moths. I believe I know what
moths look like, in
any state.
I have three candles here on the table which I
disentangle from the plants and light when
visitors come.
The cats avoid them, though Small's tail caught
fire once. I
rubbed it out before she noticed. I don't mind
living alone.
I like eating alone and reading, I don't mind
sleeping
alone. The only time I mind being alone is when
something is
funny, when I am laughing at something funny, I
wish someone
were around. Sometimes I think it is pretty funny
that I
sleep alone.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a French poet, adventurer,
and merchant-trader. -Eds.
Harper's Magazine, May 1976.
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