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Annie Dillard
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held.
I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when the
shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth,
a biggish one with a two-inch wingspread, flapped into the fire, drooped
abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, and frazzled in a second. Her
moving wings ignited like tissue paper, like angels' wings, enlarging
the circle of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the
green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine; at
once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine,
foul smoke. At the same time, her six legs clawed, curled, blackened,
and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making
a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving
mouthparts cracked like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was,
so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and
legs. Her head was a hole lost to time. All that was left was the
glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax---a fraying, partially
collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a
wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking
abdomen to her thorax to the shattered hole where her head should have
been, and widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to
the ground like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two
winding flames of identical light, side by side. The moth's head was
fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or
kneeling---only glowing within, like a boiling fire glimpsed through
silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone
to God, while I read by her light, kindled while Rimbaud in Paris burnt
out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet. |
