Most large sphinxes pay quiet visits at night,
but not the Hummingbird Clearwing. Black antennae
clamped to its head like forceps, crawling undone
from a bed of thorns, this flying hypodermic is not
what one expects. Its thorax, ridged with green fur,
the base of a light bulb screwed to a lick of fire,
no bird: an imposter, a thumb-sized sea lion with wings
of burnt newspaper, now dousing itself in a milkweed.
And when it unfurls the primal eel of its tongue, longer
than law, long as the lion-moth itself, to wade
what one had thought was a rose, one would surrender
one’s timid original hand, let this tongue rinse
away such useless placenta that is oneself and not
moth or salt or claw or shadow or heat—
because Pyramus and Thisbe weren’t ready for what
they saw. Having forsook their wall for a time
they imagined would be real, with unmodified moonlight
refracting off another’s suddenly atomic
face: who can tell the blood from the berry,
the knife from the tooth? Immersed in the brine
of what one desires, a discriminating brain is useless. The peri-
meter shot, the wall rubble, one meets a brand-
new loneliness, alienation without borderlines,
an indifferent, customless sea, where one drowns.
The moth: its umbilical tongue retracts, coils a rung
in its brain. Having peeled the rind off enough suns
for one hour, its wings’ alchemical thunder gears
up for today’s exit. Yet those antennae, that deliverance:
two black oars angle up from the waves, and the oarsman waits.
