The moths have their own religion
one of colour and flight
fuzzy feelers searching for luminescence
not so different from us humans
following our flights of fancy
allowing our imaginations
to pave the way for our good intentions
not always fulfilled
but we try
with Sunday school children
and church bazaars
Sunday sermons and tapioca pudding
searching for heights
and falling from grace
like the moths
obsessed with the light
Does the Wail Diminish?
elegy for Miles Davis
You were a Hell Hound
howling at the moon
on a moonless night,
had enough bad taste
to believe in your own existence
despite every authority’s proof
. that you were gone.
Pouring out the empty spaces between notes
like the sacramental wine in a goblet of solid brass
– sounding, like a bell
. in the bass
. of an ocean
. orchestra.
Why did I pick up that glass?
Wine doesn’t sit well on an empty stomach.
And I’m allergic to sulfites.
I could have avoided it all.
The nausea, the vomit,
the horrified look on her face.
No excuses. I did. And boy,
did it make a mess to clean up
This thing has three parts;
Three will be returned thrice more
One, two,
Three times…
There is the before time:
the boyhood, the uncertain masculinity, the obliviousness
The now time:
the girlhood, the transition, the finally finally figuring it out, the contentedness
And the then time:
the woman I will be, the knowing altogether who I am, the victory
Matthew Zapruder is a poet, a teacher, an editor, a translator, and an accomplished guitar player. He is the co-translator of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, and editor-at-large of Wave Books (He edited Tyehimba Jess’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Olio). Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry—the second of which, The Pajamaist, was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award—and one book of prose on the art and craft of poetry. He is a professor in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California.
The fledglings out the dining
window are full and flown;
two weeks it took their down
to fluff, their pinions stress,
their constant parents snatching
moths to stuff their needy maws.
After evensong at the abbey, we walk circles
in the woods, weaving through deerflies
in kamikaze flights. The cerulean warbler
mates among these trees, we’re told,
so we keep vigil for blue flickers in leaves.
So far, nothing. On half-submerged logs,
turtles perch like hard-shelled gods—
We canoe to the deepest part of the lake
before we can talk about who we were
before the other existed as witness.
Crow Cento
There was a broken jaw of light at dusk where the crows
pinned to each tree
the hammer’s shadow in the shadow of a hand.
Sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice,
claim the far away in me—
a never air, the lens for being.
Every microcosm needs its crow,
and the crows are up to no good:
They invented the earth for people,
inventing pizzicato as they fled the horizon.
My new bra feels like a hug
It holds fast where I need
It embraces and invites
supportively
It also lingers too long
awkwardly
It digs in places
Just like a hug does
sometimes
I.
Each April, I walked among crushed tulips
after the last snow
and headstones for fallen soldiers,
my favorite for James Miller, last of the Minutemen,
“I am too old to run,” inscribed in the stone.
I imagined him falling to his knees
delivering himself, negating himself
as the red storm blew in.