Distorted

[rejectomorph]

A moth who likes my light crawls the outside of my window. Its wings are pale and appear translucent as seen from the underside it displays to me. Its body is even paler, as are its thin, jittery legs. It crawls to the top of the window, then back to the bottom, again and again. The shape of its open wings and their intricate markings fascinate me. This moth is like a small fan covered with improbably fine decorative patterns.

Things that resemble much smaller or larger versions of some other thing always catch my attention. On seeing them, I'm sometimes reminded of a fever I had when I was very young, when I thought the room was receding from me, as though I were seeing it through the large end of a telescope, and at the same time nearby objects, such as the pattern on the bedspread, seemed to have grown to gargantuan proportions. After that fever, I never again saw the world in quite the same way as I had before, having become sensitive to anything suggestive of distortion.

Now things suggestive of other things catch my attention, and I get the feeling that this correspondence must mean something, but I never quite figure out what that meaning might be. Metaphor drives me to distraction. I am still fevered, by some childhood illness decades gone. The sense of unreality I felt then has never entirely left me, but lurks in corners of my mind until something with inexplicable familiarity stirs it awake. That moth crawling up and down for no reason that I can discern will never reach my lamp to the light of which it is drawn. It's trapped on the other side of the glass. I watch it, and picture its reflection in my gazing eyes.




Sunday Verse

Domination of Black

by Wallace Stevens


At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.