This is the last day of April, and thus we come to the end of another National Poetry Month. I hope you have enjoyed this year’s Poem-A-Day series at least as much as I’ve enjoyed curating and sharing it with you all. If you’ve missed any of the poems, just click through the previous post breadcrumbs at the bottom of each page to see them all. It was, if I do say so myself, an excellent collection again this year.
Tonight we end this series with “Hinged Double Sonnet for the Luna Moths” by Sean Nevin, a poem from an anthology of poetry about mermaids, although this poem really only tangentially refers to mermaids in particular. Yet I think the careful reader will notice in here themes that we commonly associate with mermaids, or sirens at least.
I love this poem in part because its vivid imagery reminds me of going to the Moss Wood Retreat in Maine. On Penobscot Bay in June, I have to wear a jacket and scarf and socks on the screened-in porch all day; the colors of the landscape are fluid, deep, and rich; mosquitos and spiders and — yes — moths look over my shoulder as I write. I could sit there and drink tea and write poetry and stories for a week and never look up to see how many days had passed, and when I’m there, that’s generally what I do. What, if not that, is one true type of love?
Hinged Double Sonnet for the Luna Moths
—Norton Island, Maine
For ten days now, two luna moths remain
silk-winged and lavish as a double broach
pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin.
Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green
of copper weather vanes nosing the wind,
the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen’s
green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore,
the plush green peat that carpets the island,
that hushes, sinks then holds a boot print
for days, and the sapling-green of new pines
sprouting through it. The miraculous green
origami of their wings—false eyed, doomed
and sensual as the mermaid’s long green fins:
a green siren calling from the moonlight.
A green siren calling from the moonlight,
from the sweet gum leaves and paper birches
that shed, like tiny white decrees, scrolled bark.
They emerge from cocoons like greased hinges,
all pheromone and wing, instinct and flutter.
They rise, hardwired, driven, through the creaking
pine branches tufted with beard moss and fog.
Two luna moths flitting like exotic birds
toward only each other and light, in these
their final few days, they mate, then starving
they wait, inches apart, on my cabin wall
to die, to share fully each pure and burning
moment. They are, like desire itself, born
without mouths. What, if not this, is love?
***
Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate (Southern Illinois University Press 2008) and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and he has served as Associate Professor and director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Drew University and Arizona State University.
