21 - Nature

Moths

By Eavan Boland

Tonight the air smells of cut grass. Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is a place mislaid between expectation and memory. This has been a summer of moths. Their moment of truth comes well after dark. Then they reveal themselves at our windowledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer. The books I look up about them are full of legends: ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk. Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon. The moon is up. The back windows are wide open. Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.

Once again they are near the windowsill – fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender, which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them they will fall down without knowing how or why what they steered by became, suddenly, what they crackled and burned around. They will perish – I am perishing – on the edge and at the threshold of the moment all nature fears and tends towards: the stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile. And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes my child’s shadow longer than my own.

Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Outside History, several volumes of nonfiction, and coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, among other honors. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and at Stanford University, where she was the director of the creative writing program. www.lithub.com